Top 30 Cleveland Amory Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What this world needs is a new kind of army – the army of the kind.”

— Cleveland Amory

2. “Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize – especially when it comes to what he wants to eat.”

— Cleveland Amory

3. “To anyone who has ever been owned by a cat, it will come as no surprise that there are all sorts of things about your cat you will never, as long as you live, forget. Not the least of these is your first sight of him or her.”

— Cleveland Amory

4. “Support your right to arm bears.”

— Cleveland Amory

5. “For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.”

— Cleveland Amory

6. “You can’t make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things.”

— Cleveland Amory

7. “It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating – after all, they are women – but they cannot be curmudgeons.”

— Cleveland Amory

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8. “As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.”

— Cleveland Amory

9. “The customer is always right! John Wanamaker must be turning in his grave. If you’re a customer today, you’re an intruder.”

— Cleveland Amory

10. “On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can’t make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

— Cleveland Amory

11. “People ask me what makes a good funeral, and I tell them the most important thing is your man in the casket. If you have a man of substance in there, you have the makings of a first-class funeral.”

— Cleveland Amory

12. “Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child’s play compared to the selection of the cat’s name.”

— Cleveland Amory

13. “You can give of your talent, you can give of your possessions, or you can give of yourself. For God’s sake, give something.”

— Cleveland Amory

14. “Opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.”

— Cleveland Amory

15. “Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they’re just like a schoolboy with a new girl.”

— Cleveland Amory

16. “I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for Martin Van Buren. He wrote his autobiography, you know, and never once mentioned his wife. Now that’s what I call a mans man.”

— Cleveland Amory

17. “You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat.”

— Cleveland Amory

18. “The facts of life are very stubborn things.”

— Cleveland Amory

19. “In my day the schools taught two things, love of country and penmanship-now they don’t teach either.”

— Cleveland Amory

20. “It has long been a theory of mine and I am known, if I do say so, for my long theories that authors, generally speaking, are rotten letter writers.”

— Cleveland Amory

21. “As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the Republicans are Socialists and the Democrats are Bolsheviks.”

— Cleveland Amory

22. “The people that set one animal against another haven’t the guts to be bullies themselves. They’re just secondhand cowards.”

— Cleveland Amory

23. “Relations between the sexes are so complicated that the only way you can tell if members of the set are going together is if they are married. Then, almost certainly, they are not.”

— Cleveland Amory

24. “There are three terrible ages of childhood – 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.”

— Cleveland Amory

25. “The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose.”

— Cleveland Amory

26. “I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.”

— Cleveland Amory

27. “I will omit but I will not distort.”

— Cleveland Amory

28. “I can’t take a well-tanned person seriously.”

— Cleveland Amory

29. “I consider the 3 most cruelly produced foods to be from lobsters, dropped alive into boiling water, veal from calves separated from their mothers and kept in crates, and pate de foie gras.”

— Cleveland Amory

30. “A “good” family, it seems, is one that used to be better.”

— Cleveland Amory

31. “Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?”

— Cleveland Amory

32. “I told the good Father that if he and I were going in the future to some wonderful Elysian Field and the animals were not going to go anywhere, that was all the more reason to give them a little better shake in the one life they did have.”

— Cleveland Amory