everyone old enough to have a secret is entitled to have some place to keep it.

When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.

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

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.

Manners require showing consideration of all human beings, not just the ones to whom one is close.

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.

One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges.