Quotes About Civility

Simplicity is a great element of good breeding.

Civility is not simply about manners.

You have to care about what you're doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don't have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty. I refuse to be a part of that.30

The trouble with us is that we've been too polite with each other.

One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.

I figured he was adhering to the adage that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't make fun of the person paying the mortgage.

As dear Erasmus said, "It is part of the highest civility if, while never erring yourself, you ignore the errors of others." Besides, it is a law of nature that he who corrects others will soon do something perfectly awful himself. On

Without such rules, there are no exchanges of ideas, only exchanges of set positions and insults. People who disagree rapidly move from talking over one another to shouting one another down, and from expressing their opinions on the matter at hand to expressing their opinions of the intelligence and morality of those who disagree with them.

I would never call myself anti-football. I think I'm pro-information, pro-people making informed individual choices, pro-health, so for that reason, personally, I'm apathetic towards football. But at the same time, I think we can retain some civility, and I understand why people support and love it.

The Sanders Institute will not be taking any potshots at people.

In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.

You can do TV and radio without the personal insults.

Making personal attacks or speaking with malicious intention is something that I have always refrained from.

I just think the Internet has made us ruder.

Polite conversation is rarely either.

Kyoya: I don't like this food. But do you think I'd be so inhuman as to complain after you treated me? That's a rude assumption.

This is not the time for partisan bickering. This is not the time for politics as usual. Some of us are Democrats. Some of us are Republicans. Some of us are Independents. Above all, we must be Oklahomans first.

There is a worldwide longing for civility.

Societal civility is the extension and expansion of individual gallantry: it's all about—or ought to be about—balance and restraint

Although cable news has, I believe, done much damage in undercutting civility in political discourse—a civility to which more journalists and newscasters aspired in the pre-cable era—it is insufficient to simply single out blowhards like Bill O'Reilly, or Fox News overlord Roger Ailes, or on the left, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. The problem is partly that there's money in staging the televisual equivalent of cockfighting.

Restoring genteel notions of civility to TV will not provide a magic cure for all that ails us politically today. But Firing Line offers a model for what smart political TV once was.

Abandoning traditions of responsibility and civility won the GOP control of both houses of Congress in 1994. Rejecting any compromise brought Republicans the perks and power of majority control for the first time in 40 years. Thus did the politics of total resistance become their path of least resistance.

You can have a certain arrogance, and I think that's fine, but what you should never lose is the respect for the others.

the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since the creature that conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. we are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.