Dear Quote Investigator: The following adage is largely used to deride people who are preoccupied with gossip:
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
The words are attributed to social activist and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, but I have been unable to find a solid supporting citation. Similar statements have been ascribed to philosopher Socrates and U.S. Naval engineer Hyman Rickover. Would you please examine this topic?
Quote Investigator: The earliest strong match known to QI appeared in a 1901 autobiography by Charles Stewart. As a child in London, Stewart listened to the conversation of dinner guests such as history scholar Henry Thomas Buckle who would sometimes discourse engagingly for twenty minutes on a topic. Boldface has been added to excerpts:[1]
His thoughts and conversation were always on a high level, and I recollect a saying of his, which not only greatly impressed me at the time, but which I have ever since cherished as a test of the mental calibre of friends and acquaintances. Buckle said, in his dogmatic way: “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”
Stewart was pleased with Buckle’s adage, but he did not let its implicit guidance dictate his conversations. He wished to avoid the tedium of monotonous dialogues:
The fact, of course, is that any of one’s friends who was incapable of a little intermingling of these condiments would soon be consigned to the home for dull dogs.
Buckle’s tripartite remark specified the categories: persons, things, and ideas. The questioner’s statement used the division: people, events, and ideas. So the statements did differ; indeed, the remark evolved during decades of circulation, and it was reassigned to a variety of individuals.
Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.
The saying printed in 1901 was rooted in a long tradition of advice about the proper topics of conversation. For example, in 1827 a book of “Letters on Clerical Manners and Habits” addressed to theological students suggested avoiding the discussion of people. Instead, one should focus on facts or ascend the ladder of abstraction to converse on principles and doctrines:[2]
…let me recommend, that, in company, even with your most intimate friends, you avoid the discussion of PERSONAL CHARACTER AND CONDUCT as much as possible; and that you prefer dwelling on those principles, doctrines, and facts, which are always and to all classes in society, interesting and instructive, and the discussion of which, moreover, is always safe.
In 1849 students of theology were told to shift the topic of conversations from persons to things. These were the first two categories mentioned by Buckle:[3]
The great temptation both to ministers and people, is to talk about persons. “Why,” said Dr. Rush to some one, “are you always talking about persons? Why do you not talk about things?” The answer is plain. It is so much easier to talk about persons than things. It is so much more gratifying to our evil natures to talk about persons, especially their faults. Any one can talk about persons.
In 1875 a church publication called “The Monthly Packet” commented on life in a religious community, and suggested that discussion of the “character, habits, or conduct” of others should be avoided. Conversational topics were split into three categories: persons, things, and ideas; the latter two found favor with the “unusually cultivated and thoughtful”:[4]
Yet as talk about persons, rather than about things and ideas, is far the commonest and most popular staple of conversation everywhere—save amongst unusually cultivated and thoughtful people; the temptation to drift into it will prove very strong indeed in the early days of a Community, and almost irresistible at times.
In 1888 a sermon posited three conversational categories: “persons”, “things”, and “events”. Once again a hierarchy of intellect was alluded to because the latter two categories demanded “intelligence and reflection and information”:[5]
It is easier, no doubt, to talk about persons, because so many disagreeable remarks spontaneously occur to one. It is more difficult to talk about things and events, because this requires a certain amount of intelligence and reflection and information. If we are to talk of things, we must know something about them. And it is our duty to see that we do.
In 1898 a religious journal based in Philadelphia called “The Friend” printed a pithy and forceful injunction about conversation:[6]
“About things, not about persons,” may be almost styled a nursery maxim regarding the proper subjects of civilized conversation.
As noted previously, Buckle’s trichotomy was printed in a 1901 autobiography titled “Haud Immemor: Reminiscences of Legal and Social Life in Edinburgh and London 1850-1900” by Charles Stewart. The remark was further disseminated when it was reprinted within a review of Stewart’s book in a journal called “The Academy”:[7][8]
Buckle said, in his dogmatic way: “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”
In 1903 an epistolary volume presented a more concise version of Buckle’s statement while preserving the ascription:[9]
I believe it was Buckle, he of the “History of Civilisation,” who claimed that men and women were divided into three classes mentally. The first and lowest class talk of persons; the second talk about things; the third and highest about ideas.
In 1918 “Origin of Mental Species” by Henry James Derbyshire included a rephrased instance of the saying with no attribution:[10]
It has been said long ago that there were three classes of people in the world, and while they are subject to variation, for elemental consideration they are useful. The first is that large class of people who talk about people; the next class are those who talk about things; and the third class are those who discuss ideas. All of us are conscious of this and we have also realized how distasteful the lower thought is after we have accustomed ourselves to the higher.
In 1931 a reader of “The New York Times” sent in a question that was published in the “Queries and Answers” column. The descending trichotomy of ideas, events, and people was employed in this instance with an unknown ascription:[11]
“Great and Small Minds”
H. A. M.—Wanted, the correct quotation and origin of this expression: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
The following month in April 1931 a statement matching the one in “The New York Times” was published without attribution in a newspaper in San Bernardino, California.[12] In subsequent years the saying was used as an anonymous filler item in multiple newspapers across the U.S.
In 1947 James H. Halsey, the President of the University of Bridgeport, included the saying in a convocation speech, but he disclaimed authorship with the epigram label:[13]
Perhaps you have heard the little epigram which goes like this: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and little minds discuss people.” Those who spend most of their discussion time in talk about people and events are not intellectually mature.
In 1959 Hyman G. Rickover who pioneered nuclear propulsion in the Navy employed the adage, but he credited an “unknown sage”:[14]
To the uneducated, abstract ideas are unfamiliar; so is the detachment that is necessary to discover a truth out of one’s own knowledge and mental effort. The uneducated person views life in an intensely personal way—he knows only what he sees, hears or touches and what he is told by friends. As the unknown sage puts it, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
For dull dogs.
Of course we’re decades into the reversal of the previous wisdom. Now EVERYTHING is about people, individuals (“under President Vladimir Putin”). Take away the word Assad, or Putin, or “anti-vaxxers” from news media and public and corporate officials, and there’s just nothing left. After decades of this there’s nothing left in the ordinary riff raff either. We live the life of gossip, denounce, diminish, demonize. And nothing else. A downward spiral headed by deranged psychotics, an emptied metiche society.
Works in reverse too: Biden is not only annointed by God to tell everyone the way it is, the way everything is, Biden literally IS god. And more. For every problem under the sun there is only one solution: Biden. Biden is also the solution to all things that are NOT problems, like, the human figure and persona who happens to be the leader of Russia. The question AND the answer, the alpha AND the omega: BIDEN
It doesn’t matter what BIDEN says. He IS right. Biden IS truth. Fauci IS science. They ARE the LIGHT! And resurrected!
Metiche Society
Gossip to denounce, to inflate your deflated empty ego.
I can’t help but notice locally here I’m the subject of an orchestrated circle of gossip and denunciation, the target of a mob of near elderly “do gooders”.
This won’t make sense to them but to anyone observing, while I swear like a sailor on occasion when I want to (gasp), because I was one, in terms of worldview, I’m about as “fringe” and “dangerous” as George F. Kennan, author of ”The Long Telegram”, foundation stone of western establishment doctrine itself, the cable to the US State Department in 1946 that established the Cold War itself, gave it its shape, structure, purpose, strategy and tactic, containment of the Soviet Union: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116178.pdf
51 years later in 1997 Kennan (the same) warned against NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, Russian response inevitable and utterly avoidable, the responsibility for it NATO’s entirely, NATO expansion completely unnecessary and ill-advised, the consequences dire.
No one is more core establishment than Kennan.
Or, was.
They ignored him. Try to figure that out and search the world in vain.
Stanley Kubrick though in 1964 for the illustration. There’s nothing to figure out and all the facts are in. These people are obviously psychotic.
Interview with alfred de zayas spells it out in plain english:
Kumbaya Delusion
NATO is not a Kumbaya society. NATO has been on a rampage of war of aggression since 1992, all of it (look it up, from statements of US officials), from Yugoslavia, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Libya, to Syria, to Somalia and beyond, all of it a war against Russia, to “clean up, while we can, all the post-Soviet space”, …to overthrow governments and replace them with governments that won’t maintain normal relations with Russia.
All of these wars have been maximally criminal, and violent, killing millions.
In 2014 this NATO chain of aggression and violence expanded up inside Ukraine as the US orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected (OSCE-certified) government, and its replacement with a government intrinsically hostile to Russia, and over the last 8 years, the defacto NATOization of its military infrastructure (and ideology).
Again, NATO is not a kumbaya society.
And Russia is no longer weak, as in the 1990s.
The window for “clean up” is closed.
And none of it went according to plan anyway, except for the part of the plan that was chaos for its own sake, and profiteering.
You see, there are real people behind all these disorders of our national life. Many more besides just the notorious Dr. Fauci…
One reason American movies are so bad these days is they have forgotten how to tell a story. Stuff just happens to characters. Cause, effect, and consequence no longer exist in the workshops of Hollywood. And one might sense that these imperatives are likewise missing from what used to be known as real life in the USA, with all its stories and narratives. Stuff just happens to the people in this country now. And then sometimes, stuff un-happens.
With the Russian operation in Ukraine alarming the populace, you might have forgotten the late Covid-19 epidemic that provoked so much public hysteria and government policy overreach. Stuff happened during those two-plus years of Covid-19, and, even with Ukraine blaring from the cable news channels, Covid-19 stuff is still happening. Vaccine mandates are still in force, in New York City, for instance — except for performers and ballplayers, who are exempted now, as announced this week by Mayor Eric Adams. If you detect any specious reasoning behind that diktat, at least you know who made it happen.
But so many other things just happened with Covid-19, rather serious things, and no one has had to answer for them, certainly not Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just days ago talked up another booster shot of his obviously defective mRNA “vaccines.” Dr. Fauci proposed that despite a raft of emerging statistics from the life insurance realm that indicate a shockingly high number of mysterious all-causes deaths for people in the prime of life. Several conditions appear to be killing them: 1) blood clotting in the capillaries of various organs, apparently caused by the “vaccine’s” main active ingredient, spike proteins; 2) heart inflammation (pericarditis and myocarditis); 3) a mystifying array of neurological afflictions; and 4) switched-off immune system toggles, including the cellular mechanism for preventing the growth of cancers.
This developing picture of a public health catastrophe, growing more robustly detailed by the week, has somehow not alerted the general public, not least because the entire public health officialdom does not want them to know about it. In fact, as averred to above, they are all still busy promoting the “vaccines” which are responsible. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, is rather well-known — though her duties appear limited to the public impersonation of a “concerned mom” — but whoever heard of Rebecca Bunnell, PhD, Director of the CDC’s Office of Science? Does Science play any part in the emerging disaster of sharply rising all-causes deaths? It would be good to know, don’t you think? Anyone heard from Daniel Jernigan, MD, Deputy CDC Director for Public Health Science and Surveillance (DDPHSS)? You’d think he would be out there surveilling things.
How about Brian C. Moyer, PhD, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. He would be in charge, presumably, of the VAERS system, which tabulates adverse vaccine events. That system evidently under-reports adverse events by a shocking amount — some say only 1 percent are ever recorded. Why is that? Because it is a website that is so notoriously ill-designed and hard to use that the CDC pledged to fix it more than ten years ago and never got around to it. Why is that, Dr. Moyer? Has anyone asked him? I don’t think so.
There is the appalling and still on-going campaign to suppress Covid early treatment off-label drugs such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine, et cetera, though the protocols have been proven highly effective in clinical practice as well as scores of internationally peer-reviewed studies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died because these drugs were maliciously outlawed. In many states, doctors can be punished with loss of medical licenses for using these safe and effective drugs, or even talking them up.
Who exactly in public health was responsible for this suppression? Who gave the orders for it? Or did it just happen? Was it Francis Collins, recently retired director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH)? He must have at least approved the policy. Stephen M. Hahn, MD, who was Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from Dec. 2019 to Jan. 2021, the heart of the Covid event time-line? Janet Woodcock, who was Acting Commissioner from Jan. 2021 to Feb. 2022 — and was previously the longtime chief of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research? Or the current chief of that outfit, one Patrizia Cavvazoni, MD? Or Jacqueline A. O’Shaughnessy, PhD, the FDA’s Acting Chief Scientist? Was outlawing early treatment in their purviews? Did they even know about it? How could they not?
Consider another killer on-the-scene: the drug remdesivir, a Dr. Fauci production, originally for Hepatitis-C, manufactured by Gilead Sciences. US public health has anointed remdesivir the standard-of-practice for patients severely ill with stage-two inflammatory Covid in the ICUs all over America. It is well-known that remdesivir destroys kidney function in as little as five days. This supposed anti-viral agent is being used after the high-viral-load stage-one phase of Covid is over. How many ICU patients have been killed by remdesivir?
Why not ask Judith A McMeekin, Pharma D, the FDA’s Associate Commissioner for Regulatory Affairs? Or Sam Posner, Acting Director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases? Or Rima F. Khabbaz, MD, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases? Or Debra Houry, MD, Acting Principal Deputy Director of the CDC and, since 2014, Director of the Center for Injury Prevention and Control? Or the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer, Mitchell Wolf, MD? Or Nathaniel Smith, MD, CDC’s Deputy Director of Public Health Service and Implementation? Or maybe Jay C. Butler, Deputy CDC Director for Infectious Diseases?
You see, there are real people in high places with exalted credentials who must in some way be responsible for the epic blunders committed during the Covid-19 saga. Or else they allowed these actions to happen on-purpose. Will any actual persons answer for any of this?
Oh, by the way, perhaps you noticed the ruckus over University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas (born William Thomas) recently winning the Women’s 500-yard freestyle race in the NCAA nationals. How did it happen that the six-foot-four Thomas, oddly still in possession of normal male genitalia, got permission to compete against, shall we say, natural-born women? You can ask Mark Emmert, the NCAA President, or Wendell E. Pritchett, President of the U. of Penn., or Alanna W Shanahan, Penn Director of Athletics, or Lauren C. Procopio, Assistant Director for Men’s/Women’s Swimming.
You see, there are real people behind all these disorders of our national life. Many more besides just the notorious Dr. Fauci… and many more work under all these directors of this-and-that. What have they done? Or did stuff just happen?
Not everyone lives in Clusterfuck Nation though:
Ben Toth writes:
likbez / ликбе́з
Busy Monday
Good morning, on the Day of the Liberation of Tibetans from Serfdom, and Evacuation day in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - commemorating the day the English military units left the country in 1970. I will begin with an apology and a huge thank you. Please don't wait for a detailed update from me today, because already in the morning it looks like I'm swamped with other - commercial - work. I haven't even delved into the notifications here on Facebook, because the list is literally meters long. I won't have time for proper news analysis, but I'd like to repeatedly thank each of you for the huge amount of support you've given my work this last month, all the comments, the shares, it's been unreal.
So instead I will give you a brief overview of the view from Hungary - which has outright refused to take part in this US-NATO debacle. To us - ordinary Hungarians - in this age of smartphones and independent media, it is increasingly looking like the first casualty of this conflict has been the credibility of the Mainstream Western Press in general, and the US administration in particular. After a long series of propaganda operations painting a conflict in some kind of heroic or humanitarian way, covering absolute attrition on the ground which always surfaces later, this tool is simply not working any more. We’ve seen this trick done too many times. Literally everyone I know believes the bobblehead Joe Biden has lost his mind, and all official or mainstream media are lying to us. Even though everyone here feels for the plight of innocent civilians, we know the narrative is fake.
He accidentally declared war twice yesterday in the Kurwatic Republic of Poland, shifting the nexus of madness Eastward with him. Once by telling a US air force unit in Poland that they would soon see Ukraine, and second by declaring Putin wouldn't be in power much longer. Both statements were followed immediately by white house corrections, claiming basically that he didn't mean it that way. I'll link the clarifications, I'm sure you can find the speeches freely on Youtube, if you want to watch him mumble, since they're amplified there.
With access to telegram, to on-the ground footage, this age old technique of misdirection - the magician friend of mine aptly calls it - as in look over here, but not there has failed. To blame domestic crises in Europe and the US on Big Bad Vlad has completely backfired at least in Hungary. We all know about the Donbass, about eight years of killing.
Now with the Hunter laptop weighing around his neck, Sleepy Joe's approval rate is still tanking, with the disapproval of Democrats - his own party - now on the rise. Even if he becomes some sort of fall-guy, just look at the line of succession : The incompetent Kamala Harris, then Nancy Pelosi who makes Biden look sane and healthy. There aren’t any real options here, and Washington is absolutely in a bind. And yet his Security Advisor is adamant they will hang on to the Ukraine debacle "for as long as it takes". He simply won't back down, and allow US meddling in Ukraine - including his son's profiteering and now clear links to Pentagon-funded biolabs - to end.
And yet it is ending in front of our eyes, and Vladimir Putin's approval rating still sits at a record 71 since February, the last time the statistic was measured by Levada. How could they even think he would allow a hostile military alliance to plant its weapons 500 kilometers from Moscow? After being invaded three times and rebuilding three times. First by Napoleon, then by the Kaiser in the first World War, and third by the Reich in the second. And multiple other - smaller - incursions too long to list. They have seen what the cold-black hearted ideology did on their land to their civilians. They are ending the exact same crimes done to innocent Russians, minorities and Ukrainians, for eight full years. If any analyst in the West ever dreamed of a US/NATO protectorate in Ukraine, he or she had to have been high.
Instead he got a genuine humanitarian intervention there by Russia, of which evidence will only increase to surface, and sooner or later will have to be acknowledged even here in the West. You have probably seen some documents, or videos, of Roma people tied to lamp posts, of shooting from entrenched positions in schools and theaters by Ukrainian Forces - all of which I can't risk showing you, and all of which are atrocities. Russia is now ending eight years of violence, of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine, and taking Stepan Bandera and his SS insignia wearing followers out of the book of History.
Not only is Joe’s legitimacy, but also his most potent weapon is dying. No, I don't mean cruise missiles or aircraft carriers, I mean the United States Dollar, propping up both and the country’s enormous Debt, while we face a global food and energy crisis. By we I mean us ordinary people especially in Europe and the US, because I'm sure Joe Biden - whatever his fate - and his owners won't have trouble feeding themselves or keeping their house warm. It is us who have been sacrificed in this sanctions war, which has backfired spectacularly.
Apparently the symbol Z is banned in parts of Germany now, even Zürich Insurance has announced a redesign of their logo because of the association to the special operation in Ukraine. So enjoy the Soyuz launch vehicle on today’s cover, launched last Thursday from the Plesetsk cosmodrome.
