Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Sanity, Pound implies, is less a medical condition than a voting system. His line flips the usual diagnosis: the “lunatic” isn’t the one hearing voices, but the one outnumbered by people who insist their chorus is reality. It’s a neat piece of verbal judo - a definition that refuses neutrality. The “I guess” is doing quiet work, too, feigning modesty while smuggling in a hard claim: the label “lunatic” is socially assigned, not clinically discovered.

That bite lands because it exposes how quickly consensus hardens into common sense. In Pound’s world, the outsider may be visionary, crank, or both; the point is that the boundary between insight and delusion is policed by crowds, institutions, and fashion. “Surrounded” adds pressure: not merely disagreed with, but encircled, contained, deprived of escape routes. The line understands stigma as geography.

Context sharpens the irony. Pound styled himself as a modernist insurgent against cultural complacency - and later, notoriously, as a political extremist whose radio broadcasts and anti-Semitic rants helped make him, in many eyes, the textbook case of the “lunatic.” Read that way, the quip doubles as preemptive self-defense: a rhetorically clever attempt to reframe accusation as proof of persecution. It’s a dangerous seduction: sometimes the crowd is wrong; sometimes the crowd is simply noticing. Pound’s genius is that the sentence holds both truths in a single, cynical shrug.