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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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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Conversation
Manners
Teaching
Tolerance
Food
Table
Accomplishments
Feeling
Center
Practicing
Society
Tables
Polite
Family
Cooking
Culinary
Feelings
Dinner
Accomplishment
Except
Consideration

More quotes by 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.
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When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art.
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Honesty is a virtue, but not the only one. If you're in a courtroom you need the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the living room, sometimes you need anything but. Often.
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The etiquette business has its emergencies, heaven knows, but it is in the nature of etiquette emergencies that once one realizes what one has done, it is too late. One might as well get a good night's sleep and send flowers with an apology in the morning.
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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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The challenge of manners is not so much to be nice to someone whose favor and/or person you covet (although more people need to be reminded of that necessity than one would suppose) as to be exposed to the bad manners of others without imitating them.
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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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When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.
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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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The simple idea that everyone needs a reasonable amount of challenging work in his or her life, and also a personal life, complete with noncompetitive leisure, has never really taken hold.
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Smart people duck when they hear the dread announcement 'I'm going to be perfectly honest with you.
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In its natural state, the child tells the literal truth because it is too naive to think of anything else. Blurting out the complete truth is considered adorable in the young, right smack up to the moment that the child says, 'Mommy, is this the fat lady you can't stand?
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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.
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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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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Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards
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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.
Judith Martin
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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.
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[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.
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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.
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