“Well, you certainly are the most wonderfully woolly baa-lamb that ever stepped.”

Widziałaś film "Milczenie owiec"?
Co robiły owce? Milczały. Czego i tobie życzę.
To Idol contestants

The Lamb, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

The Ethics of Diet, Preface http://www.ivu.org/history/williams/preface.html from the 1st edition, 1883.

Widely attributed to Franklin on the Internet, sometimes without the second sentence. It is not found in any of his known writings, and the word "lunch" is not known to have appeared anywhere in English literature until the 1820s, decades after his death. The phrasing itself has a very modern tone and the second sentence especially might not even be as old as the internet. Some of these observations are made in response to a query at Google Answers. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=389308
The earliest known similar statements are:
A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Gary Strand, Usenet group sci.environment, 23 April 1990. http://groups.google.com/group/sci.environment/msg/057b1c6389f4776f?dmode=source
Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.
Marvin Simkin, "Individual Rights", Los Angeles Times, 12 January 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-01-12/local/me-358_1_jail-tax-individual-rights-san-diego
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), ISBN 0312123337, p. 333.
Also cited as by Bovard in the Sacramento Bee (1994) http://www.giraffe.com/gr_wolves.html
Misattributed
Variant: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

Speech to the Chambers of Commerce of the Empire (9 June 1896), quoted in The Times (10 June 1896), p. 4
1890s

The Woolly Mammoth
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 19. How, Though the Sphere Showed Me Other Mysteries of Spaceland, I Still Desired More; and What Came of It
Context: p>Those who have thus appeared — no one knows whence — and have returned — no one knows whither — have they also contracted their sections and vanished somehow into that more Spacious Space, whither I now entreat you to conduct me?SPHERE (MOODILY). They have vanished, certainly — if they ever appeared. But most people say that these visions arose from the thought — you will not understand me — from the brain; from the perturbed angularity of the Seer.I. Say they so? Oh, believe them not. Or if it indeed be so, that this other Space is really Thoughtland, then take me to that blessed Region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid things. There, before my ravished eye, a Cube, moving in some altogether new direction, but strictly according to Analogy, so as to make every particle of his interior pass through a new kind of Space, with a wake of its own — shall create a still more perfect perfection than himself, with sixteen terminal Extra-solid angles, and Eight solid Cubes for his Perimeter. And once there, shall we stay our upward course? In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. Then, yielding to our intellectual onset, the gates of the Sixth Dimension shall fly open; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth —How long I should have continued I know not. In vain did the Sphere, in his voice of thunder, reiterate his command of silence, and threaten me with the direst penalties if I persisted. Nothing could stem the flood of my ecstatic aspirations. Perhaps I was to blame; but indeed I was intoxicated with the recent draughts of Truth to which he himself had introduced me. However, the end was not long in coming. My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous crash inside me, which impelled me through space with a velocity that precluded speech. Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness — which was now to become my Universe again — spread out before my eye. Then a darkness. Then a final, all-consummating thunder-peal; and, when I came to myself, I was once more a common creeping Square, in my Study at home, listening to the Peace-Cry of my approaching Wife.</p

An Epitaph.