Life & Wisdom Quote by Edith Sitwell

Sitwell’s line lands like a cocktail of contempt and diagnosis: the public isn’t merely gullible, it’s selectively gullible. The barb isn’t “people are stupid.” It’s sharper: people are skilled at refusing what’s true, especially when truth is dull, costly, or morally implicating. By phrasing it as a condition - “so long as” - she implies an active preference system. Truth doesn’t fail because it’s hard to verify; it fails because it threatens comfort, status, and narrative.

The sentence is engineered for sting. “Anything” inflates the public’s appetite to the point of absurdity, then “not founded on truth” snaps shut like a trap, revealing the real target: our craving for stories that flatter, entertain, or absolve. Sitwell, a poet who understood performance and public taste, is also mocking the marketplace for meaning. In her era, mass media was accelerating, propaganda had shown its industrial power, and celebrity culture was beginning to make feeling outrank fact. Her cynicism reads less like elitism than like a warning about the social function of belief.

The subtext is political without naming politics: when truth becomes the least marketable ingredient, power doesn’t need to censor; it just needs to offer better fiction. Sitwell’s wit works because it’s ruthless about motive. It doesn’t ask whether the public can handle the truth. It asks whether the public even wants it.