Jean Kerr Quotes

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'

The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

It's very difficult in our society. You cannot impose certain behavioral changes. Education can do it at the right time, probably by high school. After that it is too late.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

You get social pressure from your parents, who teach you to pay attention to certain things and not to others. You get it in school.

We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Racist people, interestingly, are never as polite as smokers. Have you noticed that? Smokers always go, "Do you mind if I smoke? Oh, you do? Okay, I'll go outside and have a cigarette."

Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.

I have no use for people who exhibit manners.

There is no excuse for bad manners, except fast reflexes.

Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn't very polite.' 'I'm sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn't seem to stop the rest of us.

It's so silly not to be nice.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.

People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again.