"All sweeping assertions are erroneous"
About this Quote
Aphorisms love to dress up as laws of nature, and Landon skewers that habit with a line that deliberately steps on its own toes. "All sweeping assertions are erroneous" is a paradox engineered to make the reader flinch: it is itself a sweeping assertion. That self-undermining twist is the point. Landon isn’t offering a rule so much as dramatizing the seduction of certainty and the quicksand underneath it.
As a poet working in an era that rewarded moral pronouncements, neat lessons, and public virtue, Landon knew how easily language becomes a stage set: confident, polished, and often fake. The sentence reads like a miniature corrective to the Victorian appetite for maxim-making, where a clean generalization could pass as wisdom and a complicated truth could be dismissed as indecorous. Her intent is less to ban generalizations than to shame their swagger. The subtext: certainty is often a performance, and performance is often a kind of lie.
It also doubles as a statement about power. Sweeping claims flatten people into categories and experiences into "always" and "never" - the rhetorical machinery of gossip, moral judgment, and, in modern terms, punditry. Landon’s line insists on particularity: the messy, unquotable specifics that poetry is built to hold. It works because it turns the reader into a co-conspirator. The moment you spot the contradiction, you’re already practicing the vigilance she’s demanding: distrust the totalizing sentence, even when it sounds deliciously definitive.
As a poet working in an era that rewarded moral pronouncements, neat lessons, and public virtue, Landon knew how easily language becomes a stage set: confident, polished, and often fake. The sentence reads like a miniature corrective to the Victorian appetite for maxim-making, where a clean generalization could pass as wisdom and a complicated truth could be dismissed as indecorous. Her intent is less to ban generalizations than to shame their swagger. The subtext: certainty is often a performance, and performance is often a kind of lie.
It also doubles as a statement about power. Sweeping claims flatten people into categories and experiences into "always" and "never" - the rhetorical machinery of gossip, moral judgment, and, in modern terms, punditry. Landon’s line insists on particularity: the messy, unquotable specifics that poetry is built to hold. It works because it turns the reader into a co-conspirator. The moment you spot the contradiction, you’re already practicing the vigilance she’s demanding: distrust the totalizing sentence, even when it sounds deliciously definitive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Letitia
Add to List
