Of great minds, average minds, and small minds

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

That quotation, often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, has been on my mind a bit over the past few days, since I posted my entry “John Gee’s good news.”

In response to that little post of mine, which was written fairly carefully to avoid reigniting any long-simmering controversy between those who founded the Maxwell Institute (formerly the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) and led it for decades and those who have controlled it since 2012, several new commenters showed up on my blog seeking to rekindle the old conflict or, worse still, to demonize Dr. Gee and, quite irrelevantly, to demonize me.  (I finally gave a couple of them the boot.  They already have plenty of venues in which to post mendacious falsehoods and vent their spleens.  They don’t need my blog to do it, and I won’t permit them to do it.)

The earliest form of the statement above seems to come from a 1901 autobiography by one Charles Stewart. As a child in London, Stewart listened to the conversation of dinner guests such as the historian Henry Thomas Buckle.  Of Buckle, Stewart wrote

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.”

For more information on the background of the quotation, see

Quote Origin: Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People

The rule is, I think, simplistic.  While some folks — gossips, I suppose we would call them — seldom really rise above discussing people, nobody converses solely on the level of abstract ideas.  It would be weird, unnatural, and off-putting were someone to do so, to say nothing of it being impractical.  In fact, it would demonstrate a lack of human care and concern.  Still, I think that there is truth in the general principle.

In some ways, no form of discourse exists that is lower than malicious gossip.  As someone who has been on the receiving end of anonymous but public malicious online gossip, virtually daily, for about a decade and a half, I’m particularly aware of the phenomenon, which I find essentially incomprehensible.  I can’t imagine devoting a substantial portion of my life to such a pursuit.

Posted from London, England