Time & Perspective Quote by Ethel Barrymore

Friendship, in Barrymore's line, is less a Hallmark sentiment than a stage-smart piece of timing. "Before you need them" carries the faint bite of someone who has watched favors get mistaken for affection and desperation for intimacy. As an actress who lived inside a profession built on audition rooms, alliances, and reputations that could turn overnight, Barrymore knew how quickly a "new friend" can read like a request.

The intent is practical bordering on preventative: cultivate relationships when you still have the luxury of being unhurried, generous, and unstrategic. The subtext is a warning about transactional closeness. Need makes people perform - flatter, cling, bargain - and that performance contaminates trust. If you show up only when you're in trouble, the relationship is instantly framed by obligation and suspicion: are you here for me, or for what I can do?

It also flips the usual moral script. Barrymore isn't romanticizing self-sufficiency; she's arguing for social forethought. Friendship is infrastructure, not emergency services. You build it in the calm so it holds in the storm.

In Barrymore's era - early 20th-century celebrity culture, shifting theatrical fortunes, gossip columns weaponizing personal lives - social capital was as real as cash. This line reads like advice passed down in dressing rooms: be kind when you have no angle, invest in people when you don't have an ask, because the moment you do, your sincerity becomes harder to prove.