Pets Quotes

Shakespeare, Robert Heinlein, Jane Goodall, John Heywood and Mark Twain share the top places. Twain, in What Is Man? (1906), is withering about man’s vanity in calling an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Bertrand Russell, in 1948, points out that a dog cannot relate his autobiography or tell you that his parents were honest but poor, and Bierce’s definition of a cat is an automaton to be kicked when things go wrong at home.

Three lines are flagged. “Time spent with cats is never wasted,” credited to Sigmund Freud, is marked misattributed. A remark that a cat cannot hide its feelings is credited to Hemingway and disputed, and so is a saying about religion being like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat, credited to Oscar Wilde.