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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?

Judith Martin

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Judith Martin
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 13
Economist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Ever
Fastidious
Many
Etiquette
Troubles
Going
Question
Years
Trouble
People
Year
Face
Faces

More quotes by Judith Martin

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The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.
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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.
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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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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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Generosity and gratitude are inseparably linked.
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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.
Judith Martin
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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.
Judith Martin
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Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.
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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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When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.
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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.
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Nowadays, you form your beliefs to fit your behavior, not the other way around.
Judith Martin
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Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.
Judith Martin
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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.
Judith Martin
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When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.
Judith Martin
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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.
Judith Martin
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A general rule of etiquette is that one apologizes for the unfortunate occurrence, but the unthinkable is unmentionable.
Judith Martin
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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.
Judith Martin
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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.
Judith Martin
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Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.
Judith Martin