Selected social norms quotes

1. Wit is well-bred insolence.

2. The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.

3. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

4. People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.

5. The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

6. Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

7. When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.

8. Do not adjust your sandals while passing through a melon-field, nor yet arrange your hat beneath an orange-tree.

9. His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

10. There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.

11. Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.

12. Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.

13. She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

14. It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

15. Ladies, just a little more virginity, if you don't mind.

16. Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.

17. Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

18. Nobody can be as agreeable as an uninvited guest.

19. To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal.

20. When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

21. I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.

22. Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

23. Teas, Where small talk dies in agonies.

24. You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone.

25. I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.

26. Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.

27. Thou shalt not covet, but tradition Approves all forms of competition.

28. At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, 'How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?' He answered, 'All of them.' I wasn't surprised. But, just the same, it was kind of spooky, because not one of them had ever given me the faintest sign that he or she knew. If I had spoken about it myself, most of them would have felt it was in bad taste.

29. The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention.

30. A gloomy guest fits not a wedding feast.

31. I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.

32. Who decides when the applause should die down? It seems like it's a group decision; everyone begins to say to themselves at the same time, 'Well, okay, that's enough of that.'

33. On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit [:] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

34. He is the very pineapple of politeness!

35. A bumper of good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar.

36. 'In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.'

37. 'Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.'

38. As a child, I was taught that it was bad manners to bring attention to yourself, and to never, ever make a spectacle of yourself... All of which I've earned a living doing.

39. A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she dares.

40. In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

41. When I invite a woman to dinner I expect her to look at my face. That's the price she has to pay!

42. 'I see you are looking at my feet,' he said to her when car was in motion. 'I beg your pardon?' said the woman. 'I said I see you're looking at my feet'. 'I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor,' said the woman, and faced the doors of the car. 'If you want to look at my feet, say so,' said the young man. 'But don't be a God-damned sneak about it.' 'Let me out here, please,' the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car. The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back. 'I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them,' said the young man.

43. Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).

44. Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

45. It is necessary to make virtue fashionable.

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

47. Look at him eat soup, that's fucked up...

48. Burglars! Good gracious!' cried the little woman, springing from the bed in one bound. The word 'burglar' was a terrible one to her, as it is indeed, to every well-constituted woman. 'Robbery' does not sound nearly so awe-inspiring.

49. 'But girls often marry when they are too young,' exclaimed Mary-Marie quickly; 'so, if you don't object to my age - '

50. 'Pray, my dear,' quoth my mother, 'have you not forgot to wind up the clock?' - 'Good G-!' cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time, - 'Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?'

51. Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, - though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

52. I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

53. The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.

54. The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love, The matron's glance that would those looks reprove.

55. Oh sir! I must not tell my age. They say women and music should never be dated.

56. Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

57. The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain.

58. Politeness is organized indifference.

59. When people say to me 'Have a nice day', I reply 'Sorry, I've made other plans'.

60. After dinner at a friends house, Diana said, 'Do you have a pair of Marigolds?' I'll do the washing up. The host convinced her there was no need!

61. All liaisons between homosexuals are conducted as though they were between a chorus girl and a bishop. In some cases both parties think they are bishops.

62. Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your persona requires.

63. Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how 'pure' their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

64. This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they 'look right through you,' as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right through you at all; they are discreetly avoiding an intrusion into your space. They sense the danger in a place where a one-degree temperature rise can mean an explosion.

65. To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

66. There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.

67. ...That's just how I see male relationships. Just one pleasantry shy of a cock in the mouth.