It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.