"The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth."Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932), British author. Dr. Bernard Froelich, in Stepping Westward, bk. 2, ch. 5 (1965).The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
"The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright and critic. Henry Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, in Pygmalion, act 5.The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
"There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art."Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Essays, "History" (First Series, 1841).The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
"Manners are the happy way of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love-now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops which give such depth to the morning meadows."Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. The Conduct of Life, "Behavior" (1860).The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
"The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment: these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se."June Jordan (b. 1939), U.S. poet, civil rights activist. Moving Towards Home: Political Essays, "Civil Wars" (1989; first published 1981).The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
"I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife."James Russell Lowell (1819-91), U.S. poet, editor. Letter, 4 March 1873.The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.