"There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited"
About this Quote
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
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
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.





