Judith Martin (née Perlman; born September 13, 1938), better known by the pen name Miss Manners, is an American journalist, author, and etiquette authority.
Nowadays, you form your beliefs to fit your behavior, not the other way around.
When you're in love, you put up with things that, when you're out of love you cite.
Everybody's an art critic.
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.
We are all born rude. No infant has ever appeared yet with the grace to understand how inconsiderate it is to disturb others in the middle of the night.
The one prediction that never comes true is, 'You'll thank me for telling you this.
Visiting the sick is supposed to exhibit such great virtue that there are some people determined to do it whether the sick like it or not. . . . All visitors everywhere are supposed to make plans to depart if they observe their hosts visibly wilting or in pain, but this is especially true at hospitals.
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.
What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.
When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.
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.
Smart people duck when they hear the dread announcement 'I'm going to be perfectly honest with you.
When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.
It is one of Miss Manners's great discoveries that one needn't contradict others in order to set them straight.