Words matter. These are the best Judith Martin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Email is very informal, a memo. But I find that not signing off or not having a salutation bothers me.
Presents are symbolic. When you give them in your personal life, they should show that you are paying attention to the person to whom you’re giving them.
I try to behave myself, and I succeed.
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.
The greater the controversy, the more you need manners.
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.
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.
Freedom without rules doesn’t work. And communities do not work unless they are regulated by etiquette.
Chaperons don’t enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.
Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you’re a hermit on a mountain, you don’t have to worry about etiquette; if somebody comes up the mountain, then you’ve got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities.
People read informality as, ‘Do whatever you feel like,’ and whatever you feel like might be disastrous.
Etiquette does not render you defenseless. If it did, even I wouldn’t subscribe to it. But rudeness in retaliation for rudeness just doubles the amount of rudeness in the world.
When people start hurling insults at you, you know their minds are closed and there’s no point in debating. You disengage yourself as quickly as possible from the situation.
When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can’t live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.
Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards.
First. I began my career as a copy girl. and the White House coverage, for example, was in the then-Women’s section. So it was social coverage. It wasn’t news, although we often got rather startling news out of it.
We’re now seeing email that people thought they had deleted showing up as evidence in court. You can’t erase email. As that becomes more commonly realized, people will be a little wiser about what they type.
Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn’t need to have the rest of the universities attached.
You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to do.
Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
My children did not go through a stage of being rude to their parents. I’m sorry if that sounds incredible.
Being polite does not mean being mummified.
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.
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.
Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.
Over the last couple of decades, the personalization of the office changed dramatically… there’s an informality people often take for the absence of rules – which it’s not.
Obviously I’m going to be polite, so nobody has anything to fear from me.
The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.
