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Still people are dangerous.
-Jean De La Fontaine
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Politeness is the slow poison of collaboration.
-Edwin H. Land
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It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
-James Russell Lowell
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There can be no defense like elaborate courtesy.
-E. V. Lucas
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If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.
-Alexander Maclaren
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Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
-Horace Mann
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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
-Marshall McLuhan
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Our humility rest upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
-Margaret Mead
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Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
-H. L. Mencken
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Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down.
-Wilson Mizner
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It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
-Hector Hugh Munro
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The social dimension of reticence and nonacknowledgment is most developed in forms of politeness and deference. We don't want to tell people what we think of them, and we don't want to hear from them what they think of us, though we are happy to surmise their thoughts and feelings, and to have them surmise ours, at least up to a point. We don't, if we are reasonable, worry too much what they may say about us behind our backs, just as we often say things about a third party that we wouldn't say to his face. Since everyone participates in these practices, they aren't, or shouldn't be, deceptive. Deception is another matter, and sometimes we have reason to object to it, though sometimes we have no business knowing the truth, even about how someone really feels about us.
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/nagel/papers/exposure.html
-Thomas Nagel
from Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 27 no. 1 (winter 1998) pp 3-30. Copyright
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It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.
-John Henry Newman
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Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
-Flannery O'Connor
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Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things.
-P. J. O'Rourke
Modern Manners, 1984
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Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.
-Dorothy Parker
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Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
-Cesare Pavese
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True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can.
-Alexander Pope
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Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.
-Emily Post
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Better were it to be unborn than to be ill bred.
-Sir Walter Raleigh
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Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest.
-Jean Paul Richter
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We are decent 99 percent of the time, when we could easily be vile.
-R. W. Riis
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Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld
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Books about Manners
