Quotes About Manners

Instead of saying, "This party sucks," you can say, "What do you think of this party?" It'll give the other person an opportunity to open up to you.

In my career, I've found that only annoying people knock on open doors.

When you ask one friend to dine, give him your best wine. When you ask two, the second best will do.

Accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.

It takes no kindness to respect a man who deserves respect - it's only payment which he's earned. To give an unearned respect is the supreme gesture of charity

Please proceed, Governor.

It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: (White) People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.

I cannot bear clumsy women who rise from a chair as if they are activated by wires.

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons.

It's the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture...Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.

If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture.

He made a habit of prattling at the top of his lungs through Sunday dinners at our house. Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.

Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one's fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed.

Aren't you going to invite me in? No. You aren't very polite. That is a virtue I am seldom accused of possessing. Don't sulk, Cousin, it spoils the shape of that charming mouth.

Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour. The

First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compensate for a willingness to ignore large ones.

Churchill said, Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

Lateness is rude.

As far as I'm concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Another major change we have lived through is an intolerance of displays of force in everyday life. In earlier decades a man's willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.52 Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.

Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.