Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

All ladies arriving here as strangers it seems expect to be visited by the wives of the heads of the departments and even by the President’s wife. Mrs. Madison subjected herself to this torture, … but from which having begun the practice, she never found an opportunity of receding from.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Each and every Dutchman has his own manner of thinking, his own manners and habits, usage and speech.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop.

All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

The entertainment industry is vast and is a reflection of the society we live in.

Cultures, along with the religions that shape and nurture them, are value systems, sets of traditions and habits clustered around one or several languages, producing meaning: for the self, for the here and now, for the community, for life.

The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

A woman comes to a table, and you're supposed to get up. Period. But I don't always do it. In general, you're supposed to do it every time. But sometimes you're seated against the wall, and it's awkward.

Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same.

I am in the habit, like most British people, of holding the door open for people. But in the U.S., people don't understand it. You get odd looks or doors slammed in your face.

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.

There's no chivalry in culture any more. Sometimes you meet someone who everyone says is polite and you're like, 'Wow,' but then it's like, 'Hang on, isn't everyone supposed to be polite?'

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

It is my opinion that whatever is the custom of a nation, and is practiced by the first characters of that nation towards their chief, cannot degrade strangers who perform the same.

The etiquette question has become of so much importance as to be an object of state.