Nature & Animals Quote by Carl Van Vechten

“A cat is never vulgar” is the kind of epigram that pretends to be about pets while quietly grading the entire human social order. Van Vechten, a writer who moved through (and helped publicize) the stylish, scandal-adjacent worlds of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, knew exactly how “vulgar” functions: not as a moral category but as a weapon of taste. Call something vulgar and you don’t just dislike it; you place it beneath you.

The cat short-circuits that game. It’s an animal that performs indifference like an aristocratic art form, refusing the anxious, approval-seeking behavior people associate with bad manners. A cat’s appetite, laziness, vanity, even its occasional cruelty never reads as gauche, because the cat does not plead for interpretation. It doesn’t aspire to refinement; it simply inhabits itself. That’s the joke and the challenge: vulgarity requires a social audience, and the cat won’t grant one.

Underneath the compliment is a sly critique of human performance, especially in cultures obsessed with decorum. Van Vechten is teasing the idea that “good taste” is stable or natural; the cat’s “elegance” is really our projection, a way of romanticizing autonomy and instinct as purity. In an era thick with censorship, policing of sexuality, and anxious class signaling, the cat becomes a small, sharp symbol of unpunishable self-possession: pleasure without apology, style without striving.