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The only way to enjoy the fun of catching people behaving disgustingly is to have children. One has to keep having them, however, because it is incorrect to correct grown people, even if you have grown them yourself.

Judith Martin

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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Keep
Behaving
Children
Catching
Even
Correct
Way
Grown
People
However
Behavior
Fun
Enjoy
Incorrect

More quotes by Judith Martin

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A young lady is a female child who has just done something dreadful.
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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.
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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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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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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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The most conventional statements are both true and welcome.
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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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People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them it gives you a set of rules.
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You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?
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Washington knows that it is not safe to kick people who are down until you find out what their next stop will be.
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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.
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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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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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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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Being listened to should be sufficiently gratifying in itself, whether or not the advice is followed.
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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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If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
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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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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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It's far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
Judith Martin