222 Quotes by Judith Martin

Meanwhile, the empty forms of social behavior survive inappropriately in business situations. We all know that when a business sends its customers ‘friendly reminders,’ it really means business.

Chaperons don’t enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.

The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who ‘graze’ from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.

The more skillful the performance of false cheer, the more pleasing the effect is upon one’s public and on that private audience to whom one owes even more.

For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you’d be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.

The whole country wants civility. Why don’t we have it? It doesn’t cost anything. No federal funding, no legislation is involved. One answer is the unwillingness to restrain oneself. Everybody wants other people to be polite to them, but they want the freedom of not having to be polite to others.

You don’t want to look too chic at a Washington party or people will think you don’t have a job worth losing.

I make a distinction between manners and etiquette – manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.

It is one of Miss Manners’s great discoveries that one needn’t contradict others in order to set them straight.