My sister taught me everything I really need to know, and she was only in sixth grade at the time.
You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter.
Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.
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.
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.
Shame is the proper reaction when one has purposefully violated the accepted behavior of society. Inflicting it is etiquette's response when its rules are disobeyed. The law has all kinds of nasty ways of retaliating when it is disregarded, but etiquette has only a sense of social shame to deter people from treating others in ways they know are wrong. So naturally Miss Manners wants to maintain the sense of shame. Some forms of discomfort are fully justified, and the person who feels shame ought to be dealing with removing its causes rather than seeking to relieve the symptoms.
To sacrifice the principles of manners, which require compassion and respect, and bat people over the head with their ignorance of etiquette rules they cannot be expected to know is both bad manners and poor etiquette. That social climbers and twits have misused etiquette throughout history should not be used as an argument for doing away with it.
Learning to speak, therefore, and the power it brings of intelligent converse with others, is a most impressive further step along the path of independence. . . Learning to walk is especially significant, not only because it is supremely complex, but because it is done in the first year of life.
No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another.
I've led a very eclectic life.
You have to support your children to have a healthy relationship.