"No man," says the Russian proverb, "can rise to honour who is cursed with a stiff backbone." But the backbone of the popularity-hunter is of gristle; and he has no difficulty in stooping and bending himself in any direction to catch the breath of popular applause.
Where popularity is won by fawning upon the people, by withholding the truth from them, by writing and speaking down to the lowest tastes, and still worse by appeals to class-hatred, [147] such a popularity must be simply contemptible in the sight of all honest men.

Jeremy Bentham, speaking of a well-known public character, said: "His creed of politics results less from love of the many than from hatred of the few; it is too much under the influence of selfish and dissocial affection." To how many men in our own day might not the same description apply?
Men of sterling character have the courage to speak the truth, even when it is unpopular.

It was said of Colonel Hutchinson by his wife, that he never sought after popular applause, or prided himself on it: "He more delighted to do well than to be praised, and never set vulgar commendations at such a rate as to act contrary to his own conscience or reason for the obtaining them; nor would he forbear a good action which he was bound to, though all the world disliked it; for he ever looked on things as they were in themselves, not through the dim spectacles of vulgar estimation." [148] "Popularity, in the lowest and most common sense," said Sir John Pakington, on a recent occasion, [149] "is not worth the having.

Do your duty to the best of your power, win the approbation of your own conscience, and popularity, in its best and highest sense, is sure to follow." When Richard Lovell Edgeworth, towards the close of his life, became very popular in his neighbourhood, he said one day to his daughter: "Maria, I am growing dreadfully popular; I shall be good for nothing soon; a man cannot be good for anything who is very popular." Probably he had in his mind at the time the Gospel curse of the popular man, "Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets." Intellectual intrepidity is one of the vital conditions of independence and self-reliance of character.

A man must have the courage to be himself, and not the shadow or the echo of another.