Jacque Fresco Quotes

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.

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.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

The difference between chirping out of turn and a faux pas depends on what kind of a bar you're in.

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.

The custom of going to a party only when we have been invited is a necessary, attractive, decent way for a party to evolve.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

Respectability offends my taste.

In Sweden everybody has this perfect surface. Everyone's very polite and controls their feelings.

Parties are only bad when a fight breaks out, when men fight over women or vice versa. Someone takes a fall, an ambulance comes, and the police arrive. If you can avoid those things, pretty much all behaviour is acceptable.

We must learn which ceremonies may be breached occasionally at our convenience and which ones may never be if we are to live pleasantly with our fellow man.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

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

I think I'm expected to behave in a certain manner.

When you're writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?

Privacy is not really a concept in Japan.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.

Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.

Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established

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.