Judith Martin Quotes

The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

The primary problem in the psychology of becoming is to account for the transformation by which the unsocialized infant becomes an adult with structured loves, hates, loyalties, and interests, capable of taking his place in a complexly ordered society.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

He who reflects on another man's want of breeding, shows he wants it as much himself

We're not savages. We're English.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

I really love cursing a lot. But as I get older, I realize it's a little unseemly for women of a certain age.

I focused on how these people became how they were.

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

You get social pressure from your parents, who teach you to pay attention to certain things and not to others. You get it in school.

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist church.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Culture is but the fine flowering of real education, and it is the training of the feeling, the tastes, and the manners that makes it so.

This is what we must do so that we do not gain the reputation of Barbarians