“Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.”

Source: House Rules

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jodi Picoult595

Author 1966

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Robert Motherwell, in a catalog note to the show Black or White (1950)
Misattributed

“Do you know what black stripe is?”

Adam Rakunas American author

he said. “It’s a warning. It’s nature’s way of telling us what a bad idea it is to rely too much on one plant.”
Source: Windswept (2015), Chapter 22 (p. 287)

“The Zebra is striped all over so that the Lion can see him and eat him. Some people say he is striped so that the Lion can not see him. These people believe that the stripes of the Zebra simulate the bars of sunlight falling through the tall jungle grasses and that therefore the Zebra is invisible and that the earth is flat.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Zebra
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

“No matter what I do I could never become an English man. If you paint stripes on a donkey, that doesn’t make it a zebra.”

Imran Khan (1952) Prime Minister of Pakistan

Quoted while explaining about his early days in Britain, Former Pakistan PM Imran Khan’s ‘donkey’ reference creates waves on Twitter https://www.firstpost.com/world/watch-former-pakistan-pm-imran-khans-donkey-reference-creates-waves-on-twitter-10644561.html (May 7, 2022)

“People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1950's, Conversations With Artists, 1957