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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.

Judith Martin

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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Never
Idea
Reasonable
Life
Everyone
Complete
Inspirational
Amount
Also
Hold
Ideas
Personal
Needs
Challenges
Work
Taken
Challenging
Really
Simple
Leisure

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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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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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Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.
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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.
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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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The most conventional statements are both true and welcome.
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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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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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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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If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
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Perhaps the greatest rudenesses of our time come not from the callousness of strangers, but from the solicitousness of intimates who believe that their frank criticisms are always welcome, and who feel free to be themselves with those they love, which turns out to mean being their worst selves, while saving their best behavior for strangers.
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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 way one was brought up isn't an excuse for rude behavior.
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For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.
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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 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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We are all entitled to our little harmless habits, but we are not entitled to demand approval for them.
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Nowadays people consider it a disgrace to admit that they are not stressed.
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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without a comment is a wonderful social grace ... Children who have the habit of constantly correcting should be stopped before they grow up to drive spouses and everyone else crazy by interrupting stories to say, 'No, dear -- it was Tuesday, not Wednesday.
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