Top 100 Judith Martin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.”

— Judith Martin

2. “Generosity and gratitude are inseparably linked.”

— Judith Martin

3. “Protocol is etiquette with a government expense account.”

— Judith Martin

4. “There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.”

— Judith Martin

5. “The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.”

— Judith Martin

6. “It’s far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.”

— Judith Martin

7. “When people start hurling insults at you, you know their minds are closed and there’s no point in debating. You disengage yourself as quickly as possible from the situation.”

— Judith Martin

8. “Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.”

— Judith Martin

9. “Dishonesty is not the only alternative to honesty. There is also the highly underrated virtue of shutting up.”

— Judith Martin

10. “Greece is a good place for rebirths.”

— Judith Martin

11. “Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace.”

— Judith Martin

12. “Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.”

— Judith Martin

13. “Honesty is a virtue, but not the only one. If you’re in a courtroom you need the whole truth and nothing but the truth; in the living room, sometimes you need anything but. Often.”

— Judith Martin

14. “Adorable children are considered to be the general property of the human race. Rude children belong to their mothers.”

— Judith Martin

15. “Part of the skill of saying no is to shut up afterward and not babble on, offering material for an argument.”

— Judith Martin

16. “It is, indeed, a trial to maintain the virtue of humility when one can’t help being right.”

— Judith Martin

17. “The underlying principles of manners- respect, fairness, and congeniality.”

— Judith Martin

18. “A general rule of etiquette is that one apologizes for the unfortunate occurrence, but the unthinkable is unmentionable.”

— Judith Martin

19. “Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.”

— Judith Martin

20. “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

21. “When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.”

— Judith Martin

22. “The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who ‘graze’ from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.”

— Judith Martin

23. “Ideological differences are no excuse for rudeness.”

— Judith Martin

24. “I make a distinction between manners and etiquette – manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.”

— Judith Martin

25. “The whole country wants civility. Why don’t we have it? It doesn’t cost anything. No federal funding, no legislation is involved. One answer is the unwillingness to restrain oneself. Everybody wants other people to be polite to them, but they want the freedom of not having to be polite to others.”

— Judith Martin

26. “Email is very informal, a memo. But I find that not signing off or not having a salutation bothers me.”

— Judith Martin

27. “You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter.”

— Judith Martin

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

— Judith Martin

29. “A small wedding is not necessarily one to which very few people are invited. It is one to which the person you are addressing is not invited.”

— Judith Martin

30. “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, no one wants to live any other way.”

— Judith Martin

31. “Sometimes we do things a certain way just because that is the way we do things.”

— Judith Martin

32. “Fairness does not consist so much of everybody’s doing the same thing, but of everybody’s being willing to do something that others don’t want to do.”

— Judith Martin

33. “We have the reverse of the Puritan work ethic in America now. No one ever becomes a star by plugging along year after year. What is needed is flair, talent, ‘an eye,’ contacts, charisma, and, most of all, naturalness.”

— Judith Martin

34. “For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you’d be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.”

— Judith Martin

35. “Miss Manners herself, while never rude, is given to pulling a fast pinch in the way of a handshake on those who believe in kissing on, not even the first date, but the first sighting.”

— Judith Martin

36. “Everybody’s an art critic.”

— Judith Martin

37. “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

38. “When someone has tried to please you, it is rude, as well as disheartening, to respond by announcing that the effort was a failure.”

— Judith Martin

39. “Washington knows that it is not safe to kick people who are down until you find out what their next stop will be.”

— Judith Martin

40. “What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.”

— Judith Martin

41. “The pejorative term “political correctness” was adapted to express disapproval of the enlargement of etiquette to cover all people, in spite of this being a principle to which all Americans claim to subscribe.”

— Judith Martin

42. “The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year’s Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?”

— Judith Martin

43. “You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?”

— Judith Martin

44. “One should not be assigned one’s identity in society by the job slot one happens to fill. If we truly believe in the dignity of labor, any task can be performed with equal pride because none can demean the basic dignity of a human being.”

— Judith Martin

45. “There are always proper responses, even to rude questions.”

— Judith Martin

46. “It has always puzzled me, in my business, that people think they have to answer questions, no matter how disagreeable or dangerous, just because they were asked. Of course, we journalists would be out of business if they didn’t.”

— Judith Martin

47. “The truly essential bargain between host and guest requires the guest only to respond promptly, show up on time, socialize with other guests, thank the host, write additional thanks and reciprocate. You needn’t bring anything.”

— Judith Martin

48. “Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children – if you’re lucky. But the idea that it’s elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.”

— Judith Martin

49. “Etiquette enables you to resolve conflict without just trading insults. Without etiquette, the irritations in modern life are so abrasive that you see people turning to the law to regulate everyday behavior. This frightens me; it’s a major inroad on our basic freedoms.”

— Judith Martin

50. “We are all born rude. No infant has ever appeared yet with the grace to understand how inconsiderate it is to disturb others in the middle of the night.”

— Judith Martin