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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.

Judith Martin

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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Without
Unimportant
Comment
Allowing
Pass
Grace
Mistake
Wonderful
Social

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You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to do
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Learn graceful ways of saying no and of pointing out that this pressure to do something is not in line with most people's wishes.
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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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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.
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Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.
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Try not to annoy your relatives unnecessarily.
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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.
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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.
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If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
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The most conventional statements are both true and welcome.
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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 a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.
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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 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.
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Visiting the sick is supposed to exhibit such great virtue that there are some people determined to do it whether the sick like it or not. ... All visitors everywhere are supposed to make plans to depart if they observe their hosts visibly wilting or in pain, but this is especially true at hospitals.
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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.
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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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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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Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.
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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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