Bret Stephens Quotes

Observe decorum, and it will open a path to morality.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Nothing is less important than which fork you use. Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is ethics. It is honor.

Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.

We have defined decency down.

The more elegance the less virtue in all times and countries.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offence.

Gentlemen don't do that.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

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

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

The law often allows what honor forbids.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

America does not want vulgarity and sexual exploitation to be our values and we do not want the world to think those are our standards. We want to be a better nation and a better people, with better standards.

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

I'm a gentleman, if nothing else. It's taken me years to become one, but finally I have a sense of propriety.

You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners.

I hate the irreverent rabble and keep them far from me.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.

I don't think it would be dignified.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics. Each is indispensable to civilization. Without law, we should be at the mercy of the least scrupulous; without ethics, law could not exist.