"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"Happiness is a warm puppy."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
— George Bernard Shaw

"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 man."
— Mark Twain

"“Meow” means “woof” in cat. "
— George Carlin

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Dogs never bite me. Just humans."
— Marilyn Monroe

"I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
— Winston S. Churchill

"If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much."
— Mark Twain

"Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in."
— Mark Twain

"I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her."
— Ellen DeGeneres

"A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself."
— Josh Billings

"You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us."
— Robert Louis Stevenson

"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
— Leo Tolstoy

"All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed.
For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.
(Snoopy, at his typewriter)"
— Charles M. Schulz

"Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer."
— Dean Koontz (False Memory)

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men."
— Alice Walker

"You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals."
— Paul McCartney

"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court."
— Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)

"Man is the cruelest animal."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience."
— Woodrow Wilson

"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"If you don't own a dog, at least one, there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life."
— Roger Caras

"The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's."
— Mark Twain

"If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry. "
— Dave Barry

"I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer."
— David Sedaris

"I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth."
— Walt Whitman

"Acquiring a dog may be the only opportunity a human ever has to choose a relative."
— Mordecai Wyatt Johnson

"The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied."
— Caroline Knapp

"My favorite animal is steak."
— Fran Lebowitz

"Anyone who hates children and animals can't be all bad."
— W.C. Fields

"Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.
'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.
'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.'
'If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.'
'But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.
'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'
They moved on."
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

"Every dog must have his day."
— Jonathan Swift

"The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his."
— James Thurber

"I wish outer space guys would conquer the Earth and make people their pets, because I'd like to have one of those little beds with my name on it."
— Jack Handy

""Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not, himself, find peace."

"
— Albert Schweitzer (Animals, Nature and Albert Schweitzer)

"Hair on a man's chest is thought to denote strength. The gorilla is the most powerful of bipeds and has hair on every place on his body except for his chest."
— Anton Szandor LaVey

"We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog has made an alliance with us."
— Max Depree

"The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?

Such a house could even be the whole world."
— Lydia Millet (How the Dead Dream)

"If frogs had side pockets, they'd carry hand guns."
— Dan Rather

"All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it."
— Samuel Butler

"'They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"I've been on so many blind dates I should get a free dog."
— Whitney M. Young Jr.