Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Trollope

A Victorian novelist clocking capitalism with the cool annoyance of someone who has watched a good society get rearranged by bad incentives. Trollope’s line lands because it treats “certainty” like a verdict, not a discovery: the modern world has shifted so decisively that persuasion can outweigh substance. The dagger is in “anything.” Not “anything good,” not “anything useful” - anything, full stop. That single word turns the sentence from a business tip into a moral diagnosis.

The intent isn’t to sneer at commerce in the abstract; Trollope was too observant for that. It’s to spotlight a new machinery of belief. Advertising doesn’t merely inform; it manufactures legitimacy, wraps mediocrity in inevitability, teaches the public to confuse repetition with truth. “Only advertise sufficiently” is a devastating simplification: as if effort can be substituted for value, as if the public’s attention is a lever that can move wealth regardless of what sits on the other end.

Context matters. Trollope wrote in an era when mass print, expanding urban markets, and rising consumer culture were changing how people encountered goods and ideas. The novel itself was becoming a commodity, and Trollope - prolific, professional, sometimes accused of writing to market - knew the tension between art and salesmanship from the inside. The subtext is self-aware: he’s warning about a system that can sell snake oil, yes, but also one that pressures everyone, including writers, to become their own pitchmen. The cynicism isn’t fashionable; it’s prophetic.