Anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad.

The line is a characteristically inverted W. C. Fields quip: it flips a familiar moral test (“anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad”) into a joke by treating misanthropy as a redeeming trait. Fields cultivated a public persona of the curmudgeon—suspicious of sentimentality, impatient with social niceties, and fond of undercutting pieties about innocence (children) and loyalty (dogs). The humor depends on the audience’s expectation that kindness to children and animals signals goodness; by reversing that expectation, the quote satirizes simplistic moral judgments and celebrates a comic, contrarian view of human nature.