Judith Martin Quotes

The more you act like a lady, the more he'll act like a gentleman.

People are pretty respectful for the most part.

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

Don't keep your good manners to the end another time, but begin with them.

Civility is a choice.

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

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

Racist people, interestingly, are never as polite as smokers. Have you noticed that? Smokers always go, "Do you mind if I smoke? Oh, you do? Okay, I'll go outside and have a cigarette."

There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.

If you are going to worry all night, you should let the hostess know that you're coming for cocktails and leaving when everyone sits down for dinner. If you do need to call to check in, people will understand, but excuse yourself from the table and head to the ladies room to do it.

I have seen people rude by being over-polite.

We often laughed at others in our house, and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and laughing later if there was anything to laugh about.

Manners form the great charm of women.

Manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people.

such is the effect of true politeness, that it banishes all restraint and embarassment.

Don’t lick the guests, darling. Bad manners.

It would be nice if people said, God bless you not just when you sneezed but also when you farted.

Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information.

Being polite is not only the right way to respond to people but also the easiest. Life is so filled with unavoidable conflict that I see no reason to promote more confrontations.

People give out compliments because it's polite.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.

I'm not a fan of purposely farting in front of other people. If you have to fart, leave the room.

The challenge of manners is not so much to be nice to someone whose favor and/or person you covet (although more people need to be reminded of that necessity than one would suppose) as to be exposed to the bad manners of others without imitating them.

Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them.