
“5324. Two Dogs fight for a Bone, and a third runs away with it.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Act I, sc. vi
Tom Thumb the Great (1730)
“5324. Two Dogs fight for a Bone, and a third runs away with it.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
" Malcolm X: Make It Plain http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/malcolmx/filmmore/pt.html," from The American Experience, season 6, episode 6, PBS (first aired 26 January 1994)
Attributed
“The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone”
"Lowside of the Road", Mule Variations (1999).
"Confession" in Complete Works of Jack London, Delphi Classics, 2013
Variant: Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.
Hurry Home, Candy (1953)
Remarks at Republican National Committee Breakfast (31 January 1958) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11229; Eisenhower hear delivers his particular variation of a pre-existing proverb, which has since become widely dispersed as simply "It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog." In that form it has become widely attributed to Mark Twain on the internet, as early as 1998, but no contemporary evidence of Twain ever using it has been located. The earliest known variants of it occur in 1911, one in a collection of sayings "Stub Ends of Thoughts" by Arthur G. Lewis, in Book of the Royal Blue Vol. 14, No. 7 (April 1911): "It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that matters", as cited in The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro, p. 232, and the other as "It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins" in the evening edition of the East Oregonian (20 April 1911) http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2015-October/139250.html
1950s
Variant: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
“It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
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.
Variants:
It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that matters.
"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
It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins.
Anonymous quote in the evening edition of the East Oregonian (20 April 1911)
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it's the size of the fight in the dog.
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
Misattributed