Polite Society Quotes

An armed society is a polite society.

That roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.

I'm more attracted to the bad guys. Why? Because in real life, I don't know any good guys. I know okay guys. I know polite guys. I know people who can control themselves.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

If an armed nation were a polite nation, America would be paradise. We have more than 200 million guns in private owernship here. But our manners are not getting better.

A well armed society is a polite society.

But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

As with most things in life, Lady Maccon preferred the civilized exterior to the dark underbelly (with the exception of pork products, of course.)

In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.

In a few more days we will celebrate Xmas, the day we commemorate the birth of you-know-who. ...It seems the modern consensus of enlightened people that his name should be used in polite society only when cursing.... [P]oliticians are often eager to associate themselves personally with you-know-who, even -- and especially -- when they rather flagrantly ignore his injunctions.... He was out of step then, and he is out of step now. He is eternally out of step, and eternally more powerful than those who keep in step. You know who I mean.

There is no man that can teach us to be gentlemen better than Joseph Addison.

Being English, we're polite and reserved, we don't express our opinions; we're very private people.

...Everyone had to eat, but eating people wasn't polite.

It's one of these things that I've been struck by for so long about America. You know, this amazing politeness of American life that's not at all class specific. It's not like people get more polite as ascend the hierarchy of society. Just incredible good manners. It's always been something that I've noticed.

A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.

It confirms my idea that you also need more liberal gun laws. Guns lead to a polite society, as we like to say in the United States. And I think that all of western Canada would agree with me.

Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets.

In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.

The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.

On its face, Donald Trump's hateful musings about women and his boastful claims of sexual dominance should be reason alone to drive him from polite society and certainly to blockade him from the West Wing. Yet somehow, his misogyny has instead propelled his campaign to the brink of the Republican nomination.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.