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

She only maintains that it is possible, under some circumstances, for a lady to murder her husband; but that a woman who wears ankle-strap shoes and smokes on the street corner, though she may be a joy to all who know her and have devoted her life to charity, could never qualify as a lady.

people, in forming their opinions of others, are usually lazy enough to go by whatever is most obvious or whatever chance remark they happen to hear. So the best policy is to dictate to others the opinion you want them to have of you.

It doesn't matter whether the bride or the bridegroom writes the letters of thanks for wedding presents provided that these go out immediately after the arrival of each present and are not in the handwriting of the bride's mother.

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

Ideological differences are no excuse for rudeness.

Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.