Martin Luther King’s family was also famous for using copyright to suppress the use of his words and image in works of art.  I don’t know if they’re still doing thing.  At the same time, some of them wondered why the Civil Rights movement had lost its spirit.

ardee—That’s a thought.  Instead of sententious expressions, we could have ‘[sententious expression]’ on coffee cups.  Long ago, someone I knew had cups made with ‘[expletive deleted]’ on them, but he just gave them away.  I’d like to sell mine in Whole Foods for $6.99.

The only meanings of sententious I’ve ever observed has been ‘pretending to absent significance’ or ‘gravely or pedantically pompous’.  I had no idea it had nonpejorative meanings.

In my meaning, besides providing a standard for decorating coffee cups, it is a crucial element of politicians’ speech, along with sentimentality and sanctimony.  The three S’s.

a : given to or abounding in aphoristic expression b : given to or abounding in excessive moralizing. 2. : terse, aphoristic, or moralistic in expression : pithy, ...

Sententious, nice! If you put it on a coffee mug I’d buy it…;-)

Wherever one reads something that enlightens, whether mug or tee shirt, the enlightens part remains. Oh boy do we need enlightenment.

Or maybe they find thinking boring.  There’s always television, employment and drugs.

Putting a quotation in a notebook is quite different from putting one on a coffee cup or a wall plaque.

Beside rudely pushing sayings on people who may not be as delighted with them as the pusher, I also find a good deal of the material to be sententious, that is, to pretend to significance it doesn’t possess (for me, anyway.)  I don’t share or understand this taste for sententiousness.  ‘Today is the first day of the rest of our life.’  So what?  Yet there are yards of cards at Whole Foods available so you can inflict ‘philosophy’ on your alleged friends.

The fact that Thoreau had to be boiled down shows how superficial, even contemptuous, this practice is.

Actually I have been in the habit of writing quotes I find in articles and books into spiral notebooks. I have accumulated several of these over the decades.I sometimes just leaf through them and think about what I find therein. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my youngest daughter has been doing exactly the same thing for years.

  I cannot fathom the criticisms of some here who chastize folks for finding and respecting wisdom. Perhaps they cannot seem to find such themselves?

This is particularly interesting in regard to Maya Angelou’s criticism of the “drum
major for justice” quote on MLK’s new monument.  The quality of ideas from these
great men and women depend greatly upon context.  The previous poster is spot
on; many here are annoyed when confronted with how little they have actually
been exposed to in their university education.  I also agree with Anarcissie, we
pick and choose to polish the turds that require so very little of us.

I admit, I get attracted to those quotes.  And to be honest, to quote Ghandi or Thoreau infers you read Ghandi or Thoreau.  It lends a certain increased level of impact or stature (a true intellectual).  So imagine our collective discomfort when we discover what we all knew before.  That if you didn’t actually read the readings you might not really know if they said that or not.

And I think that the NYTimes author who talks about the larger context of their body of work is also telling.  This guy actually read their work.  Pseudo intellectual meet “the real thing”. 

So if those of us who are feeling a little chastised at this point then do what the author did—pull out the original works and peruse them…  Well probably too early to celebrate a new renaissance but it was a powerful reminder to me of how too often we want to short-circuit the liberal arts and our present keeps showing us that we really ought not to.

I liked this thoughtful little piece of work.

Actually, I find the custom of placing sententious pronouncements on coffee cups, wall plaques and greeting cards to be one of the minor plagues of our era.  I guess it’s a sort of rash caused by schoolish authoritarianism.  You greet your supposed friends by shaking a schoolmaster’s finger in their faces.  The pronouncements are often superficial, meretricious crap, too, requiring nothing of their audience but a deeper snooze.

Maybe it’s a mild version of Tourette’s Syndrome.

Duppy Durruti,

That was the best posts on Truthdig in a long time. Even handed, thoughtful, attains clarity. And to think it was under a throw-away article!

There are times when the posts are more worthwhile than the article itself, and yours was one of those times. Thanks.

-Actually it does appear to be a critique of the attempts of others to glean knowledge from great historical figures. It’s one thing if the manufacturers are purposely distorting the intent behind the quotes but it’s quite another if one purchases a bumper sticker or coffee mug and proudly displays it because they identify with the sentiment, regardless of whether or not they’ve sourced it.

  The article smacks of that arrogant intellectual vibe that conservatives always seize upon when attempting to downplay the importance of seeking higher knowledge. ‘You don’t get to identify with Gandhi because you haven’t read every letter he’s ever written.’ It’s reminiscent of Dawkins on God- I understand and agree with the overall argument, but the approach is so clumsy that it’s preaching to the choir at best, and likely offends the target reader at worst.

  It’s unfortunate that millions of struggling Americans don’t have the time to appreciate the richness of Thoreau’s work, but at least they’re aspiring to include the thoughts of great thinkers in their lives. And the implication that people can’t reinvent themselves is just plain wrong, although I admit that rarely happens due to the level of introspection and labor that’s involved.

  Ironically enough, this article, it’s motivations and ultimately it’s author can be distilled in a single quote lifted from a poem-

“...The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity…”

That’s from the Second Coming by Yeats, but don’t take my word for it, PLEASE go and source it!

As long as we are being reduced to sound-bites, be glad it’s these guys’ sound-bites? Or find that guy who could inscribe the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin and give him a job in a coffee-mug factory?

The article is not meant to be a critique of anything YOU believe in or think about, gerard. Truthdig has a certain line of attack and they stick to it pretty consistantly. This article is a criticism of the capitalist sytem and the resultant laziness or intellectual sloppiness of our American public generally.

Hope that makes ya feel better. Enjoy the show!

A more or less vapid summary of a more or less vapid
article:  “...and they want us to know that we can have it all.”  Men like Thoroeau, Gandhi, and Mandela
certainly wouldn’t want anyone ever to “know that we can have it all.” Nor does misquoting them on coffee mugs distort or degrade their basic meaning by
indicating that they were no more than “dreamers of
beautiful dreams.”
  And even if the premise of the article were true, what gives it value enough to justify taking up space?