Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

You have learned enough to see that cats are much like you and me.

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, or anything but that vain animal who is so proud of being rational.

Of all animals, he alone attains to the Contemplative Life.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be? A: You already are an animal.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.

What a dog I got, he found out we look alike, so he killed himself.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

At least 260 species of animal have been noted exhibiting homosexual behavior but only one species of animal ever, so far as we know, has exhibited homophobic behavior - and that's the human being.

We may be human, but we're still animals.

So first, your memory I'll jog, And say: A CAT IS NOT A DOG

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

Gonzo leaps like a giraffe and grabs it.

Animals talking are very rarely funny. But animals behaving as animals - always funny.