Contradictory Lyrics

[steepholm]

Remember these lines from the theme song to Cheers?

You want to go where people know
People are all the same.
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

Or perhaps it was actually:

You want to go where people know
People aren't all the same.
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

The weird thing is that they both work as feel-good messages - either about our shared humanity, or our individual uniqueness. I guess there's no real opposition there, but it still feels kind of odd that they both make sense when they appear to contradict each other. And I still don't know which version is correct.

Comments

[intertext]

I agree that they're both the same (see what I did there?). My take on it is that the lyric "people are all the same" = people are the same under the skin; appearances, race, sex, political stripe don't matter because we are all of value and all have same needs etc.