“If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.”

— Eugen Weber

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Eugen Weber 1

American historian 1925–2007

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“Cats do not give us too many chances. Abuse a cat's trust twice and you could be history, for cats are much less forgiving than dogs and will often lose their trust in you should you behave badly. A dog gives you infinite slack; not so a cat.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 2

“If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Notebook

“Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

“Of course, maybe I'd end up like one of those crazy old people with, like, sixty cats. And one day, the neighbors would complain about the smell, and it would turn out I'd died and the cats had eaten me.

Still, it might be nice to have a cat.”

Alex Flinn (1966) American children's writer

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”

Eliezer Yudkowsky Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry Potter in Ch. 2 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/2
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)

“To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic — like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

The Expanding Universe. (1933) Ch. IV The Universe and the Atom

“ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY — DON’T”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Postscript of letter to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), puplished in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 505 http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2201&chapter=203934&layout=html&Itemid=27
Context: ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY — DON’T
In the Moral Sciences Prejudice is Dishonesty.
A Historian has to fight against temptations special to his mode of life, temptations from Country, Class, Church, College, Party, Authority of talents, solicitation of friends.
The most respectable of these influences are the most dangerous.
The historian who neglects to root them out is exactly like a juror who votes according to his personal likes or dislikes.
In judging men and things Ethics go before Dogma, Politics or Nationality. The Ethics of History cannot be denominational.
Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.
Put conscience above both system and success.
History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

“A Persian Cat! Not an Iranian cat, no: an Iranian cat has a bomb under the body warmer!”

Omid Djalili (1965) Iranian-British stand-up comedian

No Agenda (2007)

“The cat would eate fish, and would not wet her feete.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.”

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Eugen Weber 1

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