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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
Many
Etiquette
Going
Troubles
Years
Question
People
Trouble
Year
Face
Faces
Ever
Fastidious

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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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.
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We are all entitled to our little harmless habits, but we are not entitled to demand approval for them.
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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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Honesty is a virtue, but not the only one. If you're in a courtroom you need the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the living room, sometimes you need anything but. Often.
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Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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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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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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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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Dishonesty is not the only alternative to honesty. There is also the highly underrated virtue of shutting up.
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Being listened to should be sufficiently gratifying in itself, whether or not the advice is followed.
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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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A wedding invitation is sent by people who have been saying, Do we have to ask them? to people whose first response is, How much do you think we have to spend on them?
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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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It's far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
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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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Only a person who considers himself too good for you is good enough.
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You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?
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One should not be assigned one's identity in society by the job slot one happens to fill. If we truly believe in the dignity of labor, any task can be performed with equal pride because none can demean the basic dignity of a human being.
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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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