David Riesman Quotes

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

Manners or etiquette ('accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior') call for no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues. Even though manners are no virtues, they are a means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crude elements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and the more capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles.

Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.

You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable.

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

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

People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them; it gives you a set of rules.

Whenever two people come together and their behavior affects one another, you have etiquette.

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.

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.

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.

Etiquette has no regard for moral qualities.

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

People who stare deserve the looks they get.

People give out compliments because it's polite.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.

The etiquette business has its emergencies, heaven knows, but it is in the nature of etiquette emergencies that once one realizes what one has done, it is too late. One might as well get a good night's sleep and send flowers with an apology in the morning.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

I read all the books I could find about manners, and the extraordinary thing was, in all books up to the end of the Second World War, most were directed at how to comport yourself in the presence of the ladies.

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 are just a formal expression of how you treat people.

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.

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

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.