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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.

Judith Martin

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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Expecting
Privilege
Honesty
Face
Faces
Come
Without
Redress
Mean
Insulting

More quotes by Judith Martin

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Dishonesty is not the only alternative to honesty. There is also the highly underrated virtue of shutting up.
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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.
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Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.
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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.
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You should resolve not to seek public approval of your private business, when you are not also prepared to accept public disapproval.
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A wedding invitation is sent by people who have been saying, Do we have to ask them? to people whose first response is, How much do you think we have to spend on them?
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What we have come to, through a combination of popular psychology and expanding technology, is a presumption that all our thoughts and feelings are worth uttering.
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Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.
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people, in forming their opinions of others, are usually lazy enough to go by whatever is most obvious or whatever chance remark they happen to hear. So the best policy is to dictate to others the opinion you want them to have of you.
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We are born charming fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.
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it's no longer socially acceptable to make bigoted statements and racist remarks. Some people are having an awful time with that: 'I didn't know anybody would be offended!' Well, where have you been? I remember when people got away with it and they don't anymore. That's fabulous.
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Nowadays people consider it a disgrace to admit that they are not stressed.
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One should not be assigned one's identity in society by the job slot one happens to fill. If we truly believe in the dignity of labor, any task can be performed with equal pride because none can demean the basic dignity of a human being.
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What restricts the use of the word 'lady' among the courteous is that it is intended to set a woman apart from ordinary humanity, and in the working world that is not a help, as women have discovered in many bitter ways.
Judith Martin
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You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?
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A lot of men got upset at the feminist movement because they had all the toys and we wanted some.
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It is said that dispensing advice is easy. What is difficult is getting anyone to listen to it.
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The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.
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The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.
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Generosity and gratitude are inseparably linked.
Judith Martin