all cats are grey in the dark

Proverb

all cats are grey in the dark

1. (UK, offensive, sometimes, vulgar) Sex is enjoyable regardless of the physical attractiveness or social station of one's partner.
   • [Of a widow:] And to make carnall appetite content,
     To take lacke of beautie but as an eye ſore.
     The fayre and the foule, by darke are lyke ſtore.
     When all candels be out, all cats be grey,
     All thingis are then of one colour, as who ſey.
     And this prouerbe ſaith, for quenching hot deſyre,
     Foule...1562, John Heywood, A Dialogue Conteynyng the Number of the Effectuall Proverbes in the Englishe Tounge..., page 10
   • ‘When all candles be out all catts be gray:’
     This none but careless leachers will say.1611, John Davies, "Vpon Englishe Prouerbs", Scourge of Folly, §387
2. (uncommon) Under some circumstances, individual distinctions are not relevant.
   • In such a darkness, in which all cats are grey, Lucrezia Borgia might well seem as white as a blue-eyed Persian. But the paradox remains that Corvo might not impossibly be right. As, but for superhuman strainings, Dreyfus might have gone down to history as a traitor to France, so may the Borgian...1907, Israel Zangwill, Italian Fantasies, page 167
   • No matter how capable and cultivated the mind, how subtle and sensitive the spirit, the individual Negro is still not free. "All cats are grey at night," and it is still long hours to go before dawn, over much of America. They order these things better in France. Double the honor, then, when a...1937, Arnold Gingrich, “Another Salute to the Living”, in Esquire, volume 8, number 3, page 5