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Smart people duck when they hear the dread announcement 'I'm going to be perfectly honest with you.
Judith Martin
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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Hear
Duck
Going
Ducks
People
Dread
Perfectly
Honesty
Smart
Conversation
Announcement
Honest
Announcements
More quotes by Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
The most conventional statements are both true and welcome.
Judith Martin
When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art.
Judith Martin
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?
Judith Martin
Nowadays, you form your beliefs to fit your behavior, not the other way around.
Judith Martin
A young lady is a female child who has just done something dreadful.
Judith Martin
What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy it is kindergarten.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
The challenge of manners is not so much to be nice to someone whose favor and/or person you covet (although more people need to be reminded of that necessity than one would suppose) as to be exposed to the bad manners of others without imitating them.
Judith Martin
People will say, 'Seventy isn't old, it's middle-aged,' and I think, middle of what - 140?
Judith Martin
The way one was brought up isn't an excuse for rude behavior.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
many of the guests will eventually leave the table to watch football on television, which would be a rudeness at any other occasion but is a relief at Thanksgiving and probably the only way to get those people to budge.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
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.
Judith Martin
