Judith Martin Quotes

There is no excuse for bad manners, except fast reflexes.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

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

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude.

That bad manners are so prevalent in the world is the fault of good manners.

Good manners require space and time.

I respect the social graces enormously. How to pass the food. Don't yell from one room to another. Don't go through a closed door without a knock. Open the doors for the ladies. All these millions of simple household behaviors make for a better life. We can't live in constant rebellion against our parents - it's just silly. I'm very well mannered. It's not an abstract thing. It's a shared language of expectations.

I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.

When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.

Please don't think me negligent or rude. I am both, in effect, of course, but please don't think me either.

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

In the society of ladies, want of sense is not so unpardonable as want of manners.

There's no excuse for rudeness.

My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back.

My family brought me up to be very respectful of people.

My mom would still be mad if I didn't say 'please' and 'thank you.'

In my culture, whispering in the company of others is considered rude.

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."

I have seen people rude by being over-polite.

All children in the '50s were taught manners, they were taught to say please and thank you, they were taught not to be rude. And I'm seeing some problems today where somebody's losing a job because they made fun of a fat lady that couldn't fit in the elevator. I mean that was the sort of thing that, when I was eight years old, my mother made it very clear to me that that was not okay to say that kind of stuff.

Says the rude child: "No, I won't do it." Says the courteous grown-up: "Yes, I won't do it.

It's impossible to expect polite behavior from people who've never witnessed it.

Good behavior is everybody's business, and good taste can be everyone's goal.

There are always proper responses, even to rude questions.