Edmund Spenser Quotes

One must observe the proper rites.

All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.

The wild Irish … are barbarous and most filthy in their diet.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

Customs represent the experience of mankind.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

I am not accustomed to protocol.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

Birthdays are meant for special occasions.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

It is my opinion that whatever is the custom of a nation, and is practiced by the first characters of that nation towards their chief, cannot degrade strangers who perform the same.

People like a bit of color and like a bit of pomp and circumstance and ceremony, and we’re rather better at it than most countries.

Her Majesty's Executioner General and General Butcher of Ireland

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

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

The savage and brutal barbarity of our enemies … is a full demonstration of that there is not the least remains of virtue, wisdom, or humanity in the British Court