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.

Every chapter of the novel opens with one or two entries from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, the ‘whimsical almanac’ with ‘a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form’ that David Wilson keeps for his own amusement; when Judge Driscoll reads some of them to the leading citizens of Dawson’s Landing, they take them ‘in the solidest earnest’ as proof that Wilson is a fool (chapter V). Here the maxim comments on the plot. Tom Driscoll is really the son of Roxy, an enslaved woman, who as a baby switched him with her master’s child; he has grown up rich and white, and ruined himself by gambling. In this chapter Roxy offers to be sold back into slavery to pay his debts. He promises to sell her to a planter up-country, and sells her instead to a planter downriver, where slavery is harshest; she realises it from the steamboat.

A dog you rescue stays grateful; a man you rescue may turn on you. In the novel it describes Tom, who betrays the mother who made him prosperous.

The chapter this heads uses the racial slur of its time, in the narration and in Roxy’s speech, in the paragraphs just after the maxim.

Kindness, Morality

• It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. (misattributed)
• Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.
• Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.
• cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Chapter XVI (“Sold Down the River”), epigraph from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Spoken by Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/starving-dog-will-not-bite-you/ (31 October 2026).

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