Dodie Smith Quotes

... 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.

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

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.

She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

I consider myself to be very correct and proper: an upright citizen.

Society doesn't have values. People have values.

In some ways, 'decency' is a hazy concept; we know it when we see it.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don't pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that "nice girls don't." He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue-but only in a certain section of society.

Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence

Good manners, to those one does not love, are no more a breach of truth, than "your humble servant," at the bottom of a challengeis; they are universally agreed upon, and understand to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the decency and peace of society.

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

Propriety is the least of all laws, and the most observed.

Much of a behavior acceptable today would be socially offensive in a saner or more logical arrangement.

As to modesty and decency, if we are simians we have done well, considering: but if we are something else-fallen angels-we have indeed fallen far.

Respectability offends my taste.

Respectability is the state of never being caught doing anything which gives you pleasure.

because everybody lies. It's part of living in society .

We're not supposed to mention f***ing in mixed company, but that's exactly where it takes place.

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.

It's not illegal to be an asshole.

Custom determines what is agreeable.