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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
Work
Taken
Challenging
Really
Simple
Leisure
Never
Idea
Reasonable
Life
Everyone
Complete
Inspirational
Amount
Also
Hold
Ideas
Personal
Needs
Challenges

More quotes by Judith Martin

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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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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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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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Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards
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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 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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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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Try not to annoy your relatives unnecessarily.
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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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One of the big no-nos in cyberspace is that you do not go into a social activity, a chat group or something like that, and start advertising or selling things. This etiquette rule is an attempt to separate one's social life, which should be pure enjoyment and relaxation, from the pressures of work.
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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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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.
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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.
Judith Martin
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We are all entitled to our little harmless habits, but we are not entitled to demand approval for them.
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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I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.
Judith Martin
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. . . women were brought up to have only one set of manners. A woman was either a lady or she wasn't, and we all know what the latter meant. Not even momentary lapses were allowed there is no female equivalent of the boys-will-be-boys concept.
Judith Martin
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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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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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A lot of men got upset at the feminist movement because they had all the toys and we wanted some.
Judith Martin