 Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress. |
| When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed. |
| There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class. |
| We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society. |
| Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet. |
| It's far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. |
| You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter. |
| Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue. |
| Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards. |
| 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. |
| Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not. |
| We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility. |
| You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to do. |
| Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one. |
| Parents should conduct their arguments in quiet, respectful tones, but in a foreign language. You'd be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children. |
| If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached. |
