Wealth & Money Quote by Ezra Pound

Aphorisms love to swagger as truth, but Pound treats them like financial instruments: impressive-looking paper that can still bounce. The metaphor is doing double duty. It’s a warning to readers not to accept grand, portable statements as wisdom just because they’re neatly phrased, and it’s a warning to writers not to mistake rhetorical sheen for intellectual capital. A generalization, in Pound’s view, isn’t “wrong” by nature; it’s risky. Its legitimacy is collateralized by what sits behind it: experience, evidence, and a real command of particulars.

That’s the subtext of Pound’s broader modernist project. Modernism prized precision, compression, the hard edge of the concrete image; Pound’s famous “make it new” wasn’t a license for novelty so much as a demand for exactness. His line frames general statements as credit claims: you’re borrowing authority from the world. If your account is empty - if you haven’t done the seeing, reading, thinking - the statement is pure performance.

Context sharpens the bite. Pound lived through an era when slogans, manifestos, and ideological certainties flooded public life, offering simple explanations with catastrophic consequences. He also, notoriously, fell for some of those certainties himself. That irony makes the remark feel less like a smug takedown than an anxious rule of craft and conduct: don’t trade in abstractions you can’t redeem. In a culture addicted to hot takes, it’s a bracing standard - and a quiet confession of how easy it is to fail it.