Life & Wisdom Quote by T. S. Eliot

Business, Eliot implies, has stopped being about making things and started being about making people believe. The line lands with the cool finality of a diagnosis: modern commerce is not primarily production or exchange but mass suggestion, a psychology practiced at scale. “Persuading crowds” is doing a lot of work here. It compresses advertising, public relations, branding, and the emerging arts of media manipulation into a single, almost sinister job description. The crowd is plural, faceless, and movable; the “today” is accusatory, marking a historical turn.

Eliot’s intent isn’t to sneer at selling in the abstract. It’s to flag how modernity reorganizes value around perception. In a crowded marketplace, the product becomes secondary to the story that escorts it into the public mind. That’s why the phrasing is so blunt: no romance of entrepreneurship, no comforting myth of rational consumers. Just persuasion, as if the default state of the public is resistance and the default posture of business is conquest.

The subtext also tracks Eliot’s broader anxieties about mass culture: the erosion of inwardness, the replacement of tradition with trend, the way collective appetite can be engineered. Coming from a poet who spent his career contrasting spiritual hunger with modern distraction, “persuading crowds” reads like a warning about what happens when attention becomes the chief commodity. It anticipates a world where the best-funded argument wins, and where “success” is measured less by merit than by reach.