Harvard Magazine
Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs

The Browser
Books: Not Just for Children Film: A Voice like Egypt
Open Book: An Unorthodox Union Music: Baroque Diversions
Off the Shelf Chapter & Verse


A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

Alexander Mebane would like to know who said, "It ain't what he don't know that makes a man ignorant: it's the things he does know that ain't so." He has seen a similar comment attributed to Josh Billings.

Alan Grometstein asks where Franz Kafka wrote, "Leopards break into the temple and drink dry the sacrificial pitchers; this occurs again and again until it can be predicted, and it becomes part of the ceremony."

Charles Miller seeks the source of "Africa has been created to plague ministers of foreign affairs," attributed to the marquis of Salisbury.

"decided to operate" (May-June). Brian Krostenko recognized this quotation from Callicter, from poem 121, book xi, of the Greek Anthology.

"Attention is the key" (May-June). Ellie Whitney-Yaeger cites The Sermon on the Mount (1938), by Emmet Fox, as the source of this advice (page 109).

"Katie bar the door" (July-August). Hiller Zobel was first to cite the courage of Katherine Douglas as the source of this phrase. Douglas vainly attempted to protect James I of Scotland from assassins by bolting a door with her arm. John H. Finley's The Book of Knowledge (1912) tells the story on page 240 of volume one.

"ten thousand Swedes" (July-August). John Conway was first to attribute this doggerel to Uncle Chris, a character in John van Druten's 1944 play I Remember Mama, from Kathryn Forbes's book Mama's Bank Account.


Send inquiries and answers to "Chapter and Verse," Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138. Readers seeking texts of poems or passages identified for others are asked to include a stamped, self-addressed, legal-sized envelope with their requests.

Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs
Harvard Magazine