Chamblee54

There was a post at neo prodigy yesterday that got me thinking. It starts …, “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Micro minds discuss the color of people. “ I added the last part of that.”
Now for the fallout of this. I may get motivated later to see if I can determine the author of that gem, but for now I do not know. For all we know, it is the same bartender who came up with the gem ” We are born naked, and everything after that is drag”.
I don’t know if what is going to follow is wisdom fatigue, thinking too much, or wallowing in a cynic’s swamp. As Oscar Wilde observed, ” A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing”. Maybe his credibility card was maxed out.
The point of all this ( besides providing text to go between some pictures) is that many well worded sayings turn out to be nonsense upon close examination. Take today’s headline quote, about great, average, and small minds. The discourse that followed that platitude was a commentary on the folly of gossip. Now, I agree that in a perfect world people would not gossip. Adding the phrase “bless his heart” does not make it any better. ( Any Yankee who reads this can ask a Southerner.)
May those who never gossip throw the first pebble. Yea, I thought so, lots of folks are hiding. The truth is, gossip is about as human as lying and pretending. I imagine there is a study of chimpanzees, where they talk about how mangy their neighbor’s fur is getting.
Not all ideas are good ideas. Adolph Hitler talked about ideas all the time. And a few million folks died as a result.  Jeremiah Wright talks about ideas. At the top of his lungs, and available on dvd.
I dare say the philosophers and thinkers of our time took an interest in the affairs of their neighbors. To think otherwise is to deny their humanity. “Great minds”…or the owners… have other shortcomings. I have heard too many stories about people who get a famous person to come to their party, only to get drunk and make a fool of himself.
There are other platitudes that sound good, but don’t hold up. “ I work to live, I don’t live to work” “ A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” “youth is wasted on the young”.Maybe the test of a mind is the ability to tell the difference between wisdom and a clever phrase.

The first text section of this affair is a repost . In it, the threat was made to look up the perpetrator of a certain quote. A few more “jewels of wisdom” will get the same treatment. The pictures today are from The Library of Congress .
One issue with the origin of quotes is the question ” Who said it first?” Did Mark Twain have a kooky Uncle who he stole sayings from? What about Oscar Wilde’s barber? Maybe someone else said all these famous sayings, and the person who got credit just had a good memory, and no shame. As for politicians, they generally employ speechwriters ( and have no shame).
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people This gem is generally attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt . No one seems to know when she said it. ( If it was for her newspaper column, My Day, then it is possible that an assistant thought it up.) It is sometimes credited to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. He wrote an article for Saturday Evening Post ( November 28,1959), titled “The world of the uneducated”. He prefaces the quote by saying ” as the unknown sage puts it”. As for Mrs. Roosevelt, when she found out her husband was still seeing his mistress, her mind got a lot smaller.
It is better to have people think you are a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.This nugget is credited to Confucius, Proverbs (17:28), Abe Lincoln, Socrates, Mark Twain, and Silvan Engel. The Owner and maintainer of The Quotations Page, Michael Moncur, says “This is probably just one of those aphorisms that make their way through the collective consciousness without one definitive source.”
I work to live, I don’t live to work This saying is a doozy. Does your heart stop pumping when you hit the time clock? Of course not, you are alive when you are working. Life is more than having a good time, or doing what you want to do. Part of life is going to be spent doing ugly things.
Mr. Google disagrees, with 48 million results for that phrase. The top one is Divine Caroline, featuring a header ad for Smucker’s Peach Apricot Chicken Stir Fry. The rest of the results viewed for this study were equally uplifting.
A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything Many give credit for this to Malcolm X, and he may have said it in his speeches. Wikiquote says this is a mistake, and says a preacher named Peter Marshall first said this. Another source, Answers.com , credits a British Journalist named Alex Hamilton. He is frequently confused for the Aaron Burr’s pal, Alexander Hamilton. The British Hamilton was speaking in a radio broadcast in 1978, 13 years after Malcolm X was killed.
Youth is wasted on the young This begs the question, is maturity wasted on the mature? Or, is youth wasted on the wasted? The concensus is that George Bernard Shaw first said this. The first page of Google results does not show where he said it.