Kathleen Parker Quotes

That bad manners are so prevalent in the world is the fault of good manners.

A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.

The way one was brought up isn't an excuse for rude behavior.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

Wherever you grow up, you think of it as normal.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

The pattern often has been entrenched since childhood... [abusive people] don't think that there is anything wrong with them because that is the way they were brought up in their family.

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

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

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

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.

We say grace and we say ma'am. If you ain't in to that, we don't give a damn.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

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.

I think we all are people that are the product of our backgrounds. It's wrong to think that you're not.

We see a decline of civility, and, sadly, it’s often modeled by the very people from whom we have the least right to expect it.

It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.

it is, in truth, the most absurd of all suppositions, that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him.

In a safe Western world where we're not being shot at and we're not starving, the worst thing that happens to us most days is someone's rude to us, or we accidentally insult someone. Social faux pas is the worst thing that happens to most people, most days, so we've got to concentrate on that, really.

I am put on my best behavior, which means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

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.

One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.

Good manners require space and time.