"Do not trust to the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged"
About this Quote
Cheers are cheap; that is Bristol's point, and he lands it with the cruel clarity of the gallows. By yoking applause to hanging, he strips public enthusiasm of its moral content. Noise is not endorsement. It's stimulation. A crowd can be thrilled by victory, scandal, humiliation, or death with the same lungs and the same rhythmic certainty. The line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that popularity is proof of worth. Bristol doesn't argue against support; he warns against confusing volume with loyalty.
The intent is prophylactic: inoculate the listener against the seduction of applause. He casts the audience not as a community but as weather - shifting, impersonal, sometimes violent. The subtext is about power. When leaders, performers, or would-be strivers start treating cheers as a scoreboard for truth, they become governable by whoever can produce the loudest room. Bristol's hangman's image is a blunt reminder that spectacle can turn punitive without changing its tone.
Contextually, Bristol wrote in an early-20th-century culture obsessed with public persuasion, mass media, and the mechanics of influence. In that world, "the crowd" becomes both market and jury. His sentence is a small piece of psychological self-defense: measure your work by substance, not reaction; keep your center when the room loves you, because it's the same room that might love your downfall.
The intent is prophylactic: inoculate the listener against the seduction of applause. He casts the audience not as a community but as weather - shifting, impersonal, sometimes violent. The subtext is about power. When leaders, performers, or would-be strivers start treating cheers as a scoreboard for truth, they become governable by whoever can produce the loudest room. Bristol's hangman's image is a blunt reminder that spectacle can turn punitive without changing its tone.
Contextually, Bristol wrote in an early-20th-century culture obsessed with public persuasion, mass media, and the mechanics of influence. In that world, "the crowd" becomes both market and jury. His sentence is a small piece of psychological self-defense: measure your work by substance, not reaction; keep your center when the room loves you, because it's the same room that might love your downfall.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fake Friends |
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