Judith Martin Quotes

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.

Manners are more important than laws. Upon them, in great measure, the laws depend.

All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.

Your relationship with your sister-in-law is hingeing on your brother's - or your sister-in-law's - ability to keep that relationship together.

I think people need to be treated with respect, and that's what we've demanded from everyone.

Unfortunately civility is hard to codify or legislate, but you know it when you see it. It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

You should put on the best version of yourself when you go out in the world because that is a show of respect to the other people around you.

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.

You may have the right to live anyway you like, but you don't have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.

People give out compliments because it's polite.

If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

The civilities of the great are never thrown away.

I've never really had a problem with people.

Forcing people into a situation where they're supposed to adore each other is probably bad. But letting people get on and off the 6 train without stabbing each other, that's good.

There is no policy like politeness; and a good manner is the best thing in the world either to get a good name, or to supply the want of it.

I'm generally a people-pleaser so I get high anxiety from any sort of confrontation.

Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.

People that want to control words will never ever try to break up, like, a fight on a subway. They will never confront an aggressive person on the bus. They prefer their fights to be easy.

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.

You can't just throw people at all your problems, dear.

I've never sued anybody, though there have been one or two occasions I've wanted to strangle one or two people.

I've got confidence that most people in America still have a decent sense of manners, propriety, morality.