What do you talk about?

Often expressed as, "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

An excellent point, but who said it? It is usually attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but the evidence is thin.

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:

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.”

(Bold original.) But then there's this:

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: 

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.

The saying in its various forms has been credited to many figures, but whomever originated it, it should make us think about what we talk about.