Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Chase

Genius has a way of turning small talk into scripture. Chase’s line needles a social reflex: we don’t just admire “great men,” we outsource our judgment to them. Their throwaway remarks, the verbal equivalent of a shrug, get polished into aphorisms because prestige acts like a microphone and a halo at once. The joke is that the content barely matters. Authority supplies the sparkle.

The phrase “pass for” does the real work. It suggests a counterfeit transaction, a bill accepted because the face on it is familiar. Chase isn’t attacking wit so much as the market that prices it. “Banalities” implies safe, pre-chewed truisms; the kind of ideas that require no risk and offend no patron. Yet spoken by someone anointed as “great,” the same truisms acquire the glow of insight. That’s not flattery; it’s a warning about how celebrity and power launder mediocrity.

The subtext is democratic and slightly bitter: cultures claim to value originality, then reward proximity to status. Think of how a famous novelist’s weakest interview lines get clipped into inspirational posters, or how a revered public intellectual can say something obvious about human nature and watch it circulate as if it were minted new. Chase, writing in a century obsessed with cults of personality and mass media amplification, is pointing to the oldest trick in the public square: elevate the speaker, and you can downgrade the thought.

It’s also a quiet rebuke to the “great man” myth itself. If banality reads as wit, the greatness may be less substance than projection.