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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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Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.
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We have the reverse of the Puritan work ethic in America now. No one ever becomes a star by plugging along year after year. What is needed is flair, talent, 'an eye,' contacts, charisma, and, most of all, naturalness.
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You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to do
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The etiquette of intimacy is very different from the etiquette of formality, but manners are not just something to show off to the outside world. If you offend the head waiter, you can always go to another restaurant. If you offend the person you live with, it's very cumbersome to switch to a different family.
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Being listened to should be sufficiently gratifying in itself, whether or not the advice is followed.
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Nowadays people consider it a disgrace to admit that they are not stressed.
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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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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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If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
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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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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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There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
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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.
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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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Try not to annoy your relatives unnecessarily.
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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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A young lady is a female child who has just done something dreadful.
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Screening telephone calls with a receptionist or the humbler answering machine is not a dishonorable thing to do. The warmest people in the world still need uninterrupted time to attend to their lives and should not be outwitted if they have made it obvious that they are not always available upon summons.
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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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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.
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