"The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it." -- Cleveland Amory
Cleveland Amory (2 September 1917 — 14 October 1998) was an American author who devoted his life to promoting animal rights. He was perhaps best known for his books about his cat, named Polar Bear, whom he saved from the Manhattan streets on Christmas Eve, 1977.
During the Second World War Amory served in military intelligence in the United States Army from 1941 to 1943 before joining the board of directors of the Humane Society of the United States in 1962, remaining there until 1970. In 1967, he founded the Fund for Animals. Amory also was the president of the New England Anti-vivisection Society (NEAVS) from 1987 until his death of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1998.
He also was a television critic for TV Guide during the 1960s and 1970s. Amory is noted for recruiting celebrities such as Doris Day, Angie Dickinson, and Mary Tyler Moore for his campaigns against fur clothing. Covertly, he purchased the first ocean going vessel for Captain Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Watson used this boat in his first actions against the Japanese whaling fleet.
In 1988, he made his only film appearance in the role of Mr. Danforth in Mr. North.
In 2005, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) formed a corporate combination with the Fund for Animals. The HSUS now operates the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, a sanctuary for animals in Texas.
Amory was the subject of a 2006 biography, Making Burros Fly, by Julie Hoffman Marshall.
"A "good" family, it seems, is one that used to be better.""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.""I can't take a well-tanned person seriously.""The facts of life are very stubborn things.""The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.""There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30."