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Who really said it

If you want a friend, get a dog

Not quite — the actual line is ‘if you need a friend, get a dog’ Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone Shared ‘Written by’ credit · Wall Street (1987), 20th Century Fox
Disputed In copyright

Gordon Gekko’s line in Wall Street (1987) is “… and if you need a friend, get a dog,” not “want.” And the film did not coin the saying: a version of it was already running in a Philadelphia Inquirer classified advertisement in 1911 — “IF YOU WANT A FRIEND / Buy a dog.” The popular wording is really the older proverb wearing the movie’s fame.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“If you want a friend, get a dog” Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street (1987), written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone. Commonly misquoted as "If you want a friend, get a dog" — and the saying predates the film by decades: a Philadelphia Inquirer classified ad of 19 November 1911 already read "IF YOU WANT A FRIEND / Buy a dog." Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by 20th Century Fox). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone — shared screenplay credit on Wall Street (1987). Theme: "If you want a friend, get a dog". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you want a friend, get a dog". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The line as transcribed

Work
Wall Street (1987)
Written by
Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone — a shared screenplay credit; Stone also directed
Spoken by
Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) — a fictional character
Released
11 December 1987 · distributed by 20th Century Fox

You win a few, you lose a few, but you keep on fighting . . . and if you need a friend, get a dog. Gordon Gekko’s pitch to Bud Fox

The spaced ellipsis is present in Wikiquote’s transcription, which ends the line there. Quote Investigator, which verified the line by viewing the film, continues: “It’s trench warfare out there, pal.” The two transcriptions differ slightly in punctuation but agree on the word that matters — need.

Wikiquote: Wall Street (1987 film) — Gordon Gekko

How the saying actually travelled

  • 1911 — the earliest documented form is not literary at all but a classified advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 19 November: “IF YOU WANT A FRIEND / Buy a dog,” found by Barry Popik ↗. The film is 76 years downstream of this.
  • 1941 — Hollywood gets its version. The Dunkirk Evening Observer reports Frank Fay’s advice to the newly arrived French director René Clair: “If you’re going to stay in this town and want a friend, go out and buy yourself a dog,” as documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1975 — Samuel Gallu’s play Give ’em Hell Harry puts the saying in a fictional Harry Truman’s mouth: “You want a friend in life, get a dog!” This, per Quote Investigator, citing Ralph Keyes ↗, is where the whole Truman misattribution begins — from a stage script, not a president.
  • 1987 — the film sharpens it and makes it famous. Wikiquote’s transcription ↗ gives Gekko: “… and if you need a friend, get a dog.” The switch from want to need is the writers’ contribution — and it is exactly the word the public drops.
In copyright

Wall Street was released in 1987 and distributed by 20th Century Fox, so the screenplay is far outside the US public domain, which currently reaches only works published through 1930. Screen writing is work-for-hire: the copyright sits with the studio, not with Stanley Weiser or Oliver Stone personally, even though they are the line’s authors. The short excerpt above is quoted for identification and fact-checking. The separate 1911 advertisement and the 1841 book quoted on this page are themselves long in the public domain.

Fact-check

What people get wrong here

This is a wording problem layered on an origin problem. The film is right, the character is right, the scene is right — but the sentence is off by a word, and the movie is being credited with a proverb it inherited rather than invented.

‘want’ standing in for ‘need’ Misquoted

Gekko says “and if you need a friend, get a dog.” Both Wikiquote’s transcription ↗ and Quote Investigator, which checked it against the film ↗, give “need.”

Wall Street (1987) as the source of the saying Over-credited

The film popularised it; it did not originate it. Barry Popik documents a Philadelphia Inquirer classified ad of 19 November 1911 ↗ reading “IF YOU WANT A FRIEND / Buy a dog” — seventy-six years before Gekko.

Michael Douglas / Gordon Gekko Wrong party

A screen line’s author is its writer. Gekko is a fictional character and Douglas is the actor; the words are credited to Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, whom Quote Investigator names as the screenwriters who created the character ↗.

Harry S. Truman Fabricated

The famous “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” is not Truman’s. Quote Investigator, following Ralph Keyes ↗, traces it to Samuel Gallu’s 1975 play Give ’em Hell Harry — a fictional Truman — and notes contemporary evidence that Truman kept no dog in the White House.

Carl Icahn Attributed only

Time in 2008 wrote that “If you want a friend, buy a dog” is “most often attributed to the corporate raider Carl Icahn in the mid-1980s,” as quoted by Quote Investigator ↗. That is a report of an attribution, not a citation to Icahn — and the saying predates him by decades.

The real sentence is “and if you need a friend, get a dog” — written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, spoken by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987). But the film only sharpened a saying that was already in a newspaper advertisement in 1911 ↗, and whose author nobody has ever identified.

Context

Why this one drifted

Most movie misquotes are a case of a line getting better in the retelling — sharper, punchier, more like what the scene felt like. This one is the opposite: the public’s version is blunter than the film’s. “Want” makes Gekko merely cynical about friendship. “Need” makes him contemptuous of needing anything at all, which is the actual character — the line lands inside a speech about sheep getting slaughtered and having “no feelings.”

The likeliest reason the wrong word is so sticky is that it isn’t wrong everywhere else. “Want” is the word the saying carried for the seventy-odd years before the film: the 1911 advertisement, Frank Fay in 1941, the 1975 stage Truman, and the “If you want a friend, buy a dog” line that Time says was most often pinned on Carl Icahn in the mid-1980s. People are quoting the old proverb and crediting the movie.

The public’s wording isn’t a corruption of the film. It’s the older proverb, borrowing the film’s fame.

The Icahn tangle — why the Gekko attribution feels doubly right

There is a real reason the Icahn and Gekko versions blur together. Wikipedia’s article on the film notes that Gordon Gekko “is said to be a composite of several people,” a list that includes Carl Icahn alongside Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, Asher Edelman, Michael Ovitz and Oliver Stone himself. So a saying floating around 1980s finance and attached to Icahn ends up in the mouth of a character partly modelled on Icahn — and then the character’s fame swallows the attribution whole.

That said, Time’s 2008 wording is careful and this page will be too: the phrase is “most often attributed to” Icahn. Attributed is not the same as documented. Neither Quote Investigator nor Barry Popik produces an Icahn citation from his own mouth, and the saying demonstrably predates his career by decades, so there is no basis for calling him the originator either.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Friendship

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: If You Want a Friend in Washington, Get a Dogquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Traces the Truman version to a 1975 play, quotes the Gekko line as verified against the film, and gathers the 1941, 1975, 1987 and 2008 citations.
"If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog"barrypopik.com

Barry Popik's citation trail, including the earliest documented form: an 1911 Philadelphia Inquirer classified ad. Verdict: "An old saw put in Harry Truman's mouth."
Wall Street (1987 film) — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Transcription of the Gordon Gekko monologue containing the actual line, and the screenplay credit to Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone.
Wall Street (1987 film) — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Production background: the writing credit, 20th Century Fox, the 11 December 1987 release, and the note that Gekko is a composite of figures including Carl Icahn.
Stanley Weiser — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the co-credited screenwriter: New York City born, Oliver Stone's writing partner on Wall Street and later W.

The writers, not the raider

Who actually wrote the line

Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone

American screenwriters · shared screenplay credit on Wall Street (1987)

Stanley Weiser is an American screenwriter, born in New York City, who shares the Wall Street (1987) screenplay credit with director Oliver Stone; the pair later collaborated again on W. (2008). Weiser came to the project with no background in finance and immersed himself in brokerage houses and takeover research, and he has described building Gekko’s rapid-fire cadence partly by listening to Stone on the phone. Because the credit is genuinely shared, this page names both writers rather than picking one — and neither the character Gordon Gekko nor the actor Michael Douglas is the author of the words.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source & earliest documented form

Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, screenplay by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone (20th Century Fox, 1987). Earlier form of the saying documented in “IF YOU WANT A FRIEND / Buy a dog,” classified advertisement, Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 November 1911, cited in Barry Popik, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you want a friend, get a dog’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-want-a-friend-get-a-dog

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