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

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The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.
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Try not to annoy your relatives unnecessarily.
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A small wedding is not necessarily one to which very few people are invited. It is one to which the person you are addressing is not invited.
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Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.
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There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
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it's no longer socially acceptable to make bigoted statements and racist remarks. Some people are having an awful time with that: 'I didn't know anybody would be offended!' Well, where have you been? I remember when people got away with it and they don't anymore. That's fabulous.
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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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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.
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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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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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The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?
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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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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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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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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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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 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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Being listened to should be sufficiently gratifying in itself, whether or not the advice is followed.
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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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