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It's far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
Judith Martin
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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Humility
Quality
Help
Helping
Impressive
Others
Modesty
Without
Qualities
Good
Discover
Humble
More quotes by Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
You should resolve not to seek public approval of your private business, when you are not also prepared to accept public disapproval.
Judith Martin
The only way to enjoy the fun of catching people behaving disgustingly is to have children. One has to keep having them, however, because it is incorrect to correct grown people, even if you have grown them yourself.
Judith Martin
When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.
Judith Martin
The pejorative term political correctness was adapted to express disapproval of the enlargement of etiquette to cover all people, in spite of this being a principle to which all Americans claim to subscribe.
Judith Martin
I have always believed that the key to a happy marriage was the ability to say with a straight face, 'Why, I don't know what you're worrying about. I thought you were very funny last night and I'm sure everybody else did, too.
Judith Martin
A lot of men got upset at the feminist movement because they had all the toys and we wanted some.
Judith Martin
The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.
Judith Martin
It is said that dispensing advice is easy. What is difficult is getting anyone to listen to it.
Judith Martin
The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?
Judith Martin
Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.
Judith Martin
Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
Judith Martin
It doesn't matter whether the bride or the bridegroom writes the letters of thanks for wedding presents provided that these go out immediately after the arrival of each present and are not in the handwriting of the bride's mother.
Judith Martin
When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art.
Judith Martin
When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.
Judith Martin
People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them it gives you a set of rules.
Judith Martin
We are all entitled to our little harmless habits, but we are not entitled to demand approval for them.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
Nowadays people consider it a disgrace to admit that they are not stressed.
Judith Martin
