HMMMmmm...
Number one has to be:
"He (Joseph Smith) is the man through whom God has spoken...
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 8:321
Samson.
Algore.
Nelson Mandela
Charles de Gaulle
Charles Lindbergh
Obama
The Dalai Lama.
Paul Krugman
Harold Stassen
Milli Vanilli
mentioned bit not overrated ...
Einstein
Hitler
Napoleon
Gandhi
Grant
MacArthur
MLK
Gorby
overrated...
Clintons
Al Gore
Mandela
JFK et al
Cronkite
HMMMmmm...
Number one has to be:
Are there REALLY this many folks on FR that evidently CAN'T read???
Oooops my mistake, as I evidently can't THINK!!!!
But; does past century mean from January 1, 2001 to present?
or...
from January 1, 1901 to January 1, 2001?
or...
from April 20, 1913 to April 20, 2013???
MLK
Katharine Hepburn, the emptiest of empty vessels
Frank Sinatra, a more boring, characterless voice doesn’t exist
Marcel Proust, Please, please just stop.
Steven Hawking
Abe Lincoln
Stalin
Jefferson
Napoleon
Since we can’t include any 20th century presidents, my 3 most “Overrated” would be (IMNSHO):
MLK
Che
Mandela
And Now, for the three people who have done the most damage to western civilization I nominate:
Freud
Darwin
Marx (Not Groucho!)
Galileo
DaVinci
Henry Hudson
Reggie Jackson
If Leonard Bernstein or Aaron Copland or Adlai Stevenson or Albert Schweitzer or Dag Hammarskjöld or Sinclar Lewis or Carl Sandburg or Henry Steele Commager or Thomas Hart Benton was overrated a half-century ago, people around today have trouble placing their names.
John Steinbeck is still remembered -- largely as an example of someone who was overrated by an earlier generation. Maybe Picasso's name endures in a similar way.
My answer: I was going to say Walter Cronkite, who pretty much has been forgotten already, but maybe Edward R. Murrow is a better choice.
Murrow was one of those people whose reality never matched the myth that grew up around the name. Murrow was part and parcel of the commercial system but somehow got a reputation for saintly disinterest.
F Scott Fitzgerald. People buy his class envy whining without even thinking that he was rich at one time. Wiped out in the Crash of 29. I don’t know if he heard these warnings directly but Charlie Chaplin was telling everybody he knew to get the heck out of the market just before the crash.
Sylvia Plath. She did do us one service. Any woman who quotes Plath or frequently mentions her is a person to be avoided at all costs.
It may be considered heresy to post this on freerepublic but I’ll say it anyway: Barry Goldwater.
Underrated in 1964 perhaps but highly overrated from the post-Reagan period onwards. The news that he helped his own daughter abort his own grandchild does not sound very conservative to me.