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Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

"There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited"

About this Quote

"There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited" is Sayers at her most lethal: a neat inversion that turns "proof" from a noble ideal into a party trick. The line works because it mimics the reassuring cadence of rational argument, then reveals the scam inside it. If you narrow the frame far enough, the world starts cooperating. Complexity gets edited out, inconvenient facts are rebranded as exceptions, and the conclusion arrives on schedule looking inevitable.

Sayers is skewering a particular kind of intelligence: not the slow-witted, but the bright person with a tight, self-sealing worldview. The subtext is that "proof" is often less about discovery than about stage-managing premises. Limit the questions you allow, the sources you consult, the people you listen to, and you can demonstrate almost anything with clean logic and a straight face. It's a warning about confirmation bias before the term existed, and about the seductions of systems-thinking when it becomes systems-worship.

Context matters. Writing in a Europe that had watched ideology dress itself up as reason, Sayers knew how readily rhetoric and selective evidence could launder dogma into "common sense". As a detective novelist, she also understood the narrative hunger for closure: a case feels solved when the story tightens, not necessarily when the truth is fully faced. The quote is less anti-reason than pro-humility. It demands intellectual wide-angle vision, the willingness to let stubborn facts ruin a beautiful argument.

Quote Details

TopicReason & Logic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Sayers, Dorothy L. (2026, January 17). There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-nothing-you-cant-prove-if-your-outlook-is-25894/

Chicago Style
Sayers, Dorothy L. "There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-nothing-you-cant-prove-if-your-outlook-is-25894/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-nothing-you-cant-prove-if-your-outlook-is-25894/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Dorothy Add to List
Nothing You Can't Prove: Dorothy L. Sayers' Insight
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About the Author

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Dorothy L. Sayers (June 13, 1893 - December 17, 1957) was a Author from United Kingdom.

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