Marshall McLuhan Quotes

If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you know already.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.

Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.

I was raised right — I talk about people behind their backs. It's called manners.

Only a great fool or a great genius is likely to flout all social grace with impunity, and neither one, doing so, makes the most comfortable companion.

A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.

There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good-Breeding.

We've become much more casual and much more relaxed in social interactions, where there was a formality and maybe a kind of respect at that time that doesn't exist now.

The shoe is very much an X-ray of social comportment.

U.K. guys think it is cheesy to be nice.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you're a hermit on a mountain, you don't have to worry about etiquette; if somebody comes up the mountain, then you've got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities.

She kindly laments that I am not of the party, and to be sure I honour great ladies, and I admire great wits, but I am of the same opinion in regard to assemblies that is held concerning oysters, that they are never good in a month that has not the letter R in it.

All ladies arriving here as strangers it seems expect to be visited by the wives of the heads of the departments and even by the President’s wife. Mrs. Madison subjected herself to this torture, … but from which having begun the practice, she never found an opportunity of receding from.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

All the movements of our body are not merely those dictated by impulse or weariness; they are the correct expression of what we consider decorous. Without impulses, we could take no part in social life; on the other hand, without inhibitions, we could not correct, direct, and utilize our impulses.

Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established

The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?

Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility, which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease.

That bad manners are so prevalent in the world is the fault of good manners.

Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.

Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he puts himself on a par with a society in which it would not be polite to show one's wit.