Judith Martin Quotes

Judith Martin (15)

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Today's Anniversary - 25th May

Births

• 1803 - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 1976 - Cillian Murphy
• 1932 - John Gregory Dunne
• 1953 - Stan Sakai
• 1963 - Mike Myers

Deaths

• 1681 - Pedro Calderon de la Barca
• 2005 - Graham Kennedy
• 2006 - Desmond Dekker
• 1970 - Christopher Dawson
• 1954 - Robert Capa

• Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

  Judith Martin

• Children should acknowledge other people, saying ‘hello,’ ‘good morning,’ ‘goodbye’. They should understand that there are times to sit down and be quiet. That’s a prerequisite for school. They also need a respect for authority, the lack of which is a tremendous handicap in school.

  Judith Martin

• 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.

  Judith Martin

• It’s like children getting new toys. But the excitement is over. People should be over it.

  Judith Martin

• This is a question of social control.

  Judith Martin

• We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

  Judith Martin

• It’s far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.

  Judith Martin

• Gentle reader: Yes, the thing to do is to ignore it. A general rule of etiquette is that one apologizes for the unfortunate occurrence, but the unthinkable is unmentionable.

  Judith Martin

• If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn’t need to have the rest of the universities attached.

  Judith Martin

• Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.

  Judith Martin

• 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.

  Judith Martin

• When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can’t live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.

  Judith Martin

• The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.

  Judith Martin

• Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.

  Joyce Carey

• The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don’t have to pay taxes – naturally, nobody wants to live any other way.

  Judith Martin

• The simple idea that everyone needs a reasonable amount of challenging work in his or her life, and also a personal life, complete with noncompetitive leisure, has never really taken hold.

  Judith Martin