Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I grew up in the Midwest, so I have sort of an honorable moral code. But I moved to a city and joined a sort of fast crowd. A lot of people who grew up in the city sort of aren't aware of manners and other ways of life and 'common decency.'

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

In England, we have such good manners that if someone says something impolite, the police will get involved.

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

She belongs to a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.

Evil communication corrupts good manners. I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners.

Wearing the correct dress for any occasion is a matter of good manners.

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

When people talk about political correctness, the only element of any value is good manners.

There's no chivalry in culture any more. Sometimes you meet someone who everyone says is polite and you're like, 'Wow,' but then it's like, 'Hang on, isn't everyone supposed to be polite?'

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

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.

There are few defects in our nature so glaring as not to be veiled from observation by politeness and good-breeding.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Good manners reflect something from inside-an innate sense of consideration for others and respect for self.

Politeness induces morality. Serenity of manners requires serenity of mind.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.

Decorum -- that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.

But in my book, it was basically bad taste to stare at someone's assets, no matter how much on display they were.

My father always used to say ‘treat everyone as a gentleman; not because they are, but because you are.’

It's not considered polite in Russia to count the money in someone else's pocket.

If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.