A play on words commonly used referring to vagrants or paupers as having "no visible means of support" financially, speaking to the Law Society of Upper Canada, (21 February 1936); published in Canadian Occasions (1940), p. 201. Buchan's source for this definition remains unknown. The witticism was repeated by Harry Emerson Fosdick in his On Being a Real Person (1943), ch. 1, with due acknowledgement to Buchan, and was again used by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in Look magazine (December 14, 1955). The credit for this line is therefore often wrongly given to Fosdick or to Sheen. Credit has also been given to the conductor Walter Damrosch (1862-1950).
More quotes by John Buchan
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
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Attribution
Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Buchan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.