Daily Inspiration Quote by John Heywood

Flattery becomes a club in Heywood's line: it pretends to praise "astuteness" while exposing how cheaply we hand out the label. The jab lands because the sentence is built like a reasonable concession ("may not be right") and then swerves into the real confession: agreement, not truth, is what earns our admiration. It is a compact anatomy of partisanship before the word existed.

Heywood, a Tudor dramatist with a taste for proverb and courtroom-style comedy, knew how crowds work. His plays often turn on social vanity, the way status and approval substitute for principle. Here, the speaker performs a kind of cynical honesty. By admitting allies "may not be right", he lowers the moral temperature just enough to sound fair-minded. Then he reveals the deeper bias: we reward people for mirroring our views, and we retroactively call that mirroring intelligence.

The subtext is uglier than mere hypocrisy. It suggests that "rightness" itself is negotiable inside a community of mutual applause. If you can persuade yourself that agreement equals sharpness, dissent starts to look not just wrong but stupid, or even suspect. That's a powerful mechanism for policing a group without ever arguing the facts.

In Heywood's world, this is stage-ready because it's funny in the way uncomfortable truths are funny: everyone recognizes it, no one wants to own it. Five centuries later, it reads like a dry caption under a social-media pile-on or a cable-news panel. The line doesn't predict modern tribalism so much as reveal its oldest fuel: our hunger to feel validated and clever at the same time.