Letitia Baldrige Quotes

Wearing a baseball cap or sleeveless shirt in a white-tablecloth restaurant is rude and makes other diners upset, just like someone on a cellphone.

Sometimes in a restaurant you'll see a lady dressed very nice, she picks up a menu or something... a little fan is always a little bit nice.

I'm an American searching for some sort of parameters, a way of life - I'm looking for a slight formality, for a place where you can never be overdressed.

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

I think if you've been invited to someone's house, you eat what they serve you. Even if you leave hungry, you be gracious enough to eat what they've prepared.

I know you aren't supposed to speak ill of the dead.

I get more disgusted with men all the time - particularly traveling Americans. They start out on a trip to Europe and never bother to pack a dinner jacket. This is not only stupid - it's bad manners.

There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.

Speake not of a dead man at the table.

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

Good manners require space and time.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

To use bad taste, you have to know the rules of good taste. I've always thanked my mother for that. She taught how to eat with proper table manners and all that stuff, to the point of rebellion. But I couldn't have rebelled from it if I didn't know it.

The civilities of the great are never thrown away.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets.

A moral, sensible, and well-bred manWill not affront me, and no other can.

A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.

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.

The way one was brought up isn't an excuse for rude behavior.

All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it, nor too precisely in it; what custom hath civilized is become decent, till then ridiculous; where the eye is the jury thy apparel is the evidence.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Earrings are the same as sneezes: Two is okay, but ten in a row is annoying. If you have two then, God bless you.

There's times to be dainty and times to be a pig.