"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."
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Quote collection
Judith Martin quotes (page 6 of 8)
144 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The most conventional statements are both true and welcome."
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"Sometimes we do things a certain way just because that is the way we do things."
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"She only maintains that it is possible, under some circumstances, for a lady to murder her husband; but that a woman who wears ankle-strap shoes and smokes on the street corner, though she may be a joy to all who know her and have devoted her life to charity, could never qualify as a lady."
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"Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue."
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"Only a person who considers himself too good for you is good enough."
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"Try not to annoy your relatives unnecessarily."
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"Why bring children into a world where no one writes letters?"
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"There are always proper responses, even to rude questions."
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"What is Thanksgiving without a nutty relative?"
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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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"Miss Manners herself, while never rude, is given to pulling a fast pinch in the way of a handshake on those who believe in kissing on, not even the first date, but the first sighting."
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"One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges."
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"When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite."
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"It has always puzzled me, in my business, that people think they have to answer questions, no matter how disagreeable or dangerous, just because they were asked. Of course, we journalists would be out of business if they didn't."
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"Meanwhile, the empty forms of social behavior survive inappropriately in business situations. We all know that when a business sends its customers 'friendly reminders,' it really means business."
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"You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?"
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"Question- Should I loan a small amount of money to a friend? Answer- If you are sure that you can, if necessary, spare both."
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"many of the guests will eventually leave the table to watch football on television, which would be a rudeness at any other occasion but is a relief at Thanksgiving and probably the only way to get those people to budge."
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"We have the reverse of the Puritan work ethic in America now. No one ever becomes a star by plugging along year after year. What is needed is flair, talent, 'an eye,' contacts, charisma, and, most of all, naturalness."
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