Judy Woodruff Quotes

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing - the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

When you're at dinner with somebody and they are on their phone. I think there's that lost art of conversation and so I just always try to keep my phone far away from me when I'm with people.

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

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

When Jennie, mother of Winston Churchill invited playwright George Bernard Shaw to lunch, he telegraphed: "Certainly not. What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habits?" She replied, "Know nothing of your habits; hope they are better than your manners."

A well-bred man is always sociable and complaisant.

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.

Talk often, but never long; in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company; this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.

We have the alternative. "Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?"

Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.

Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

Look, I realize both of you could happily strangle each other across the table, but I don't think that's the most effective use of our time, and frankly, I don't think I have enough money to tip the waitress for that kind of clean-up. And look, here's lunch. Let's eat that instead of eachother.

I swear I've never met a man who has your knack for lack of social grace. If you weren't naturally charming, someone would have stabbed you by now.

Want to have a short phone call with someone? Call them at 11:55 a.m., right before lunch. They'll talk fast. You may think you are interesting, but you are not more interesting than lunch.

Wine makes all sorts of creatures at table.

Suddenly, people had three phone numbers but never answered their phones.

When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.

People who stare deserve the looks they get.

A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.

People give out compliments because it's polite.

And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

Avoid banquets which are given by strangers an ignorant persons. But if there is ever occasion to join them, let your attention be carefully fixed, that you slip not into the manner of the vulgar (the uninstructed).

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

I think the sort of person you want at a party is someone who is self-aware, polite and has a basic knowledge of table manners. And that goes for both men and women.