War & Peace Quote by August Strindberg

Strindberg’s dog-hatred isn’t really about dogs. It’s a provocation aimed at the human impulse to outsource courage. By calling dogs “protectors of cowards,” he turns a beloved symbol of loyalty into an accusation: the animal becomes a living weapon for people who want the feeling of safety without the moral cost of confrontation. The bite, in other words, is delegated.

The line works because it’s deliberately unfair. Most dog owners aren’t training attack animals, and Strindberg knows that. The exaggeration is the point: he’s performing a kind of moral purism that leaves no room for the soft, domestic story we tell about pets. That harshness is also a self-portrait. Strindberg’s work and life are marked by a combative suspicion of comfort, sentimentality, and social masks; he distrusts any arrangement that lets people appear virtuous while avoiding direct accountability. In that worldview, the dog isn’t “man’s best friend,” it’s man’s plausible deniability.

There’s also a class and gender charge humming underneath. A “protector” implies property and vulnerability, a household policing its borders. Strindberg frames that posture as cowardice, scorning the bourgeois desire for security and the performance of toughness by proxy. The phrase “fight an assailant themselves” reads like a grim ethical standard: if you can’t meet violence face-to-face, you don’t deserve the tools that let you win it anyway.

It’s cynical, theatrical, and strategically abrasive, a dramatist’s line built to smoke out hypocrisy by insulting what people cherish.