Cat Quotes

Henry Beston
Author (1888-1968)

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and ees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.   And therein do we err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

~ "The Outermost House"
Dr. Louis J. Camuti

"Never believe that animals suffer less than humans.
Pain is the same for them that it is for us.
Even worse, because they cannot help themselves."

Rachel Carson

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is – whether its victim is human or animal – we cannot expect things to be much better in this world…We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature.  By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity."

Mark Twain
(Samuel Clemens)

"It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.   Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one...that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.  The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot."

"If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat."