Peter Ustinov Quotes

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.

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.

Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

The empire of custom is most mighty.

Customs may not be as wise as laws, but they are always more popular.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

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

Custom determines what is agreeable.

Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

Custom is a violent and treacherous school mistress. She, by little and lithe, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes.

Massachusetts women as a rule adhere too strongly to old-time conventions.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

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.

What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.

I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.

Very old fashioned to say that they will be well behaved but I think it's very important.

Some laws are not written, but are more decisive than any written law.

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

Custom is our nature …

Like, in Asian culture, you have to be down with the family. You have to be down with all the crazy traditional or non-traditional things we do.