Smart people duck when they hear the dread announcement 'I'm going to be perfectly honest with you.

People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them; it gives you a set of rules.

When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art.

The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.

If you can't be kind, at least be vague.

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

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