Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound sketches a bleak little physics of dissent: the heretic doesn’t get crushed by the orthodoxy so much as by friction. The moment an individual “gets hold of some essential truth,” the system doesn’t have to refute it cleanly; it only has to force the truth-teller to fight on terrain littered with “marginal errors” - small missteps, bad allies, sloppy formulations, personal flaws, tactical blunders. The real danger is exhaustion. By the time the heretic has corrected the footnotes, clarified the jargon, walked back an overreach, apologized for a tone, and defended his credibility, the original insight has been drained of oxygen.

The intent is pragmatic and ruthless: Pound is warning that being right isn’t a persuasive strategy. Institutions survive by turning debates into bookkeeping, making the dissenter litigate peripheral matters until the central claim becomes one more contested detail. There’s also a self-excusing undercurrent. “He commits so many marginal errors himself” reads like a preemptive alibi for the visionary who can’t finish the job: genius is messy; purity is for bureaucrats.

Context matters because Pound lived this drama, and not just aesthetically. As a modernist, he positioned himself against literary complacency, insisting on “essential truths” about craft, economy, and tradition. As a political actor, he became a cautionary case of the heretic who mistakes provocation for precision. The line almost anticipates how Pound would be remembered: not simply for what he saw clearly, but for the accumulating, disabling “marginal errors” that kept swallowing the argument.