David Graeber Quotes

Culturally, it's very hard to change people's attitudes about public space.

People are pretty respectful for the most part.

No important institution is ever merely what the law makes it. It accumulates about itself traditions, conventions, ways of behavior, which ... are not less formidable in their influence.

It is only by questioning what people take for granted, what people hold to be true, that we can break through the hypnosis of social conditioning.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

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."

We often laughed at others in our house, and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and laughing later if there was anything to laugh about.

The system you're brought up under tries to make you like the people that succeeded in that system.

Manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people.

Society becomes how you behave.

The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

It would be nice if people said, God bless you not just when you sneezed but also when you farted.

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.

I don't know how people act. I've never understood that.

We see a decline of civility, and, sadly, it’s often modeled by the very people from whom we have the least right to expect it.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.

What one person does, several people usually consider.

The British vice is overthinking before we speak, which is really annoying. I love the way that, in America, people are more straightforward. The American vice would be sometimes speaking too loudly. You can always hear American people on the trains!

People who stare deserve the looks they get.

If your only nice to the people that are nice to you, big deal; what do you want, a gist certificate? Everyone does that. And if you only say "hi" in the hall to the people that say hi to you, what are doing more than anyone else? Maybe you know people who are different when they're alone than when they're with their friends. they might say "hi" to you if your alone, but with a group they act like they've never seen you.

Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.

People give out compliments because it's polite.