Quotes About Civility

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence." —GEORGE WASHINGTON

Etiquette requires us to admire the human race

In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

You want respect? Treat others with respect.

No one, no matter who they are, is above common courtesy. Remember that,

The best way will be to avoid each other without appearing to do so -- or if we jostle, at any rate not to bite.

Civility costs nothing and buys everything

A talent for forgetting is necessary to maintain civility.

Note, Religion teaches good manners, and obliges us to give honour to those to whom honour is due.

Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude.

Good manners open the closed doors; bad manners close the open doors!

The more you stand aloof from the sword, from the arrow, from the lance and from the fist, the more you become civilised!

Culture makes all men gentle.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else. I think this misreads our predicament. The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions that people care about.

If you're decent to others, then you're decent to yourself.

Manners,[...] are severely underappreciated in my opinion". "Oh?" "Where practiced well, they remove the probability that someone in my position will be forced to go through the effort of killing someone in yours. Believe that on occasion that much death can become tedious.

All of us... anyone that's been in Fleetwood Mac, as far as I've been aware, has been seemingly pretty well brought up by their parents: not goody two-shoes - God knows we weren't - but there was a level of civility that the lads in the band were aware of, what is over the brink of decency.

There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities

Now, shut up, old boy,' the Captain said kindly, as he put down his leather-covered malacca stick.

Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.

Argument involves the true respect that comes from treating others as adults who can cope with challenging ideas and expecting them to treat you with a similar courtesy.

Vulgarity consists, basically, in being on first name terms with Plato or Goethe.