“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”
Letter https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2814.xml to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860 <br class="br">Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements
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Charles Darwin161
British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by… 1809–1882Related quotes
Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments
Maia Roberts and Lily, the vampire, pg. 505-506
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)
“A cat in gloves catches no mice. ”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist
On the conditions of the "Schrödinger's cat" thought-experiment, as presented in The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics (1935), translated by John D. Trimmer http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html
Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 6.
“5572. When the Cat's gone, the Mice grow sawcy.”
Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Variant: 6131. When the Cat is away,
The Mice may play.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Letter to Joel Barlow (8 October 1809); Jefferson here expresses an aversion to supporting the "fixed opinion" that blacks were not equal to whites in general mental capacities, which he asserts in his Notes on the State of Virginia he had advanced as "a suspicion only".
1800s, Post-Presidency (1809)
“It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) Chinese politician, Paramount leader of China
Quoted in Hung Li China's Political Situation and the Power Struggle in Peking (1977), p. 107
According to Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1993), p. 315, this quote is from a speech at the Communist Youth League conference in July 1962.