John McGahern Quotes

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.

Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility, which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

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

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

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

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

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.

The shoe is very much an X-ray of social comportment.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

And doing a film in that period, and having to really celebrate what they wore back then, how they sat and how they spoke. You know, what the etiquette was back then for a lady. All of those things are like putting on a wig and transforming yourself, which I love.

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

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

There's a thing that happens to Midwesterners - we spend a lot of time talking about having a different set of rules about manners. I don't know about ethics, but certainly about manners, what you would say and what you wouldn't say. And that is not very East coast.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established

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

Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.

It is perfectly right for a gentleman to say "ladies and gentlemen," but a lady should say, "gentlemen and ladies." You mention your friend's name before you do your own. I always feel like rebuking any woman who says, "ladies and gentlemen." It is a lack of good manners.

Etiquette has no regard for moral qualities.

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?

Only a great fool or a great genius is likely to flout all social grace with impunity, and neither one, doing so, makes the most comfortable companion.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.