“It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Anonymous American proverb; since 1998 this has often been attributed to Mark Twain on the internet, but no contemporary evidence of him ever using it has been located. <br class="br">Variants: <br class="br">It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that matters. <br class="br">"Stub Ends of Thoughts" by Arthur G. Lewis, a collection of sayings, in Book of the Royal Blue Vol. 14, No. 7 (April 1911), cited as the earliest known occurrence in The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro, p. 232 <br class="br">It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins. <br class="br">Anonymous quote in the evening edition of the East Oregonian (20 April 1911) <br class="br">What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it's the size of the fight in the dog. <br class="br">Dwight D. Eisenhower, declaring his particular variant on the proverbial assertion in Remarks at Republican National Committee Breakfast (31 January 1958) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11229 <br class="br">Misattributed