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Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.

Judith Martin

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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Social
Hypocrisy
Generally
Sin
Virtue

More quotes by Judith Martin

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When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art.
Judith Martin
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Parents should conduct their arguments in quiet, respectful tones, but in a foreign language. You'd be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children.
Judith Martin
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Only a person who considers himself too good for you is good enough.
Judith Martin
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We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility.
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A young lady is a female child who has just done something dreadful.
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The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.
Judith Martin
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Etiquette enables you to resolve conflict without just trading insults. Without etiquette, the irritations in modern life are so abrasive that you see people turning to the law to regulate everyday behavior. This frightens me it's a major inroad on our basic freedoms.
Judith Martin
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Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards
Judith Martin
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When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.
Judith Martin
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Washington knows that it is not safe to kick people who are down until you find out what their next stop will be.
Judith Martin
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What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy it is kindergarten.
Judith Martin
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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.
Judith Martin
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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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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
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Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.
Judith Martin
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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
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It is one of Miss Manners's great discoveries that one needn't contradict others in order to set them straight.
Judith Martin
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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
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A small wedding is not necessarily one to which very few people are invited. It is one to which the person you are addressing is not invited.
Judith Martin
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The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.
Judith Martin