Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

We are almost always wearied in the company of persons with whom we are not permitted to be weary.

U.K. guys think it is cheesy to be nice.

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 idea is that in any situation, people have a notion as to who they are and how they should behave. And if you don't behave according to your identity, you pay a cost.

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

I am not accustomed to protocol.

At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.

I don't get very involved in the L.A. scene. When you do get invited out, you are expected to be on all the time. It's just wearying.

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.

I don't go to celebrity parties a lot. I don't really enjoy them because I really like going for it in parties. And sometimes at celebrity parties, there is no dancing on tables because people... it can be a little judgmental at times. So I tend not to go unless it is Taylor Swift's birthday party; then it's amazing.

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.

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

That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who being often asked out to dinner never refuses to go.

We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.

It is perfectly right for a gentleman to say "ladies and gentlemen," but a lady should say, "gentlemen and ladies." You mention your friend's name before you do your own. I always feel like rebuking any woman who says, "ladies and gentlemen." It is a lack of good manners.

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

... Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.

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.

A lot of our lives are about being polite.

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.

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.

Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them.

I have noticed several times that people don't think I know how to behave even when I'm trying as hard as I can.