Quotes & Sayings About Having Bad Manners

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another. — George Bernard Shaw

A Mother's Advice

Manners matter, regardless of your position in society. There is no excuse in this world to practice bad manners, especially at the table. I found that out in high school. I was invited to my boyfriend's house for dinner. His parents were somewhat formal, and I knew the dinner would be "fancy," at least in my mind. My family wasn't upper class (or even middle class), and my mother never had what would be called "social graces."
Before I left, my mother gave me a piece of advice: hold your head high, be quiet, and take the lead from his mother. Even though I was scared to death, I did what my mother advised and got through the experience with flying colors.
To this day, my mother's advice has gotten me through many difficult situations, especially ones that are totally new to me! With my mother's simple advice, I know I could dine with the Queen of England, just by following her lead. Thanks, Mother!

-Deborah Ford — Deborah Ford

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot. — Robert A. Heinlein

Although there is nothing so bad for conscience as trifling, there is nothing so good for conscience as trifles. Its certain discipline and development are related to the smallest things. Conscience, like gravitation, takes hold of atoms. Nothing is morally indifferent. Conscience must reign in manners as well as morals, in amusements as well as work. He only who is "faithful in that which is least" is dependable in all the world. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

I don't do plays without jokes anymore. I've retired from those plays. I think it's bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke. — Bill Nighy

Evil communication corrupts good manners. I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners. — Benjamin Banneker

I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Judith Martin

On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. — Charles Dickens

You can get through life with bad manners, but it's easier with good manners. — Lillian Gish

To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less than three times. — Mark Boxer

You go to Hawaii alone, buy the way?"
"Who goes to Hawaii alone? I went with a girl. She's only thirteen, though."
"You slept with a thirteen-year-old girl?"
"What Do you think I am? The kid doesn't even wear a bra yet."
"Then why'd you go with her?"
"To teach her table manners, interpret the mysteries of the sex-drive, bad-mouth Boy George, go see E.T. You know, the usual."
"Gotanda gave me a long look. Then he skewed his lips into a smile. "You really are a little odd, you know?"
Now everyone seemed to think so. Motion passed by unanimous vote. — Haruki Murakami

I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights. — Raymond Chandler

Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were big hearted and friendly, though it was not the hardest place in the world to get murdered for having bad manners. Even our main crop could kill you. — Timothy B. Tyson

Am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Men sometimes have to leave their ladies alone, and ladies are not responsible for the bad manners of fools. — Charlaine Harris

Dragons were notoriously finicky about whom they ate, and thought it the height of bad manners to be kept waiting by their selected fare. — Sully Tarnish

It is bad manners to contradict a guest. You must never insult people in your own house - always go to theirs. — Myrtle Reed

For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone. — Oswald Spengler

The great secret ... is not having bad manners or good manners ... but having the same manner for all human souls. — George Bernard Shaw

If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. — Charles Dickens

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals. — Henry James

One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one. — Henry David Thoreau

Here's a bit of advice... When a woman invites you into her home... and you don't seduce her... don't seduce another woman, darling, certainly not under the same roof. It's bad manners - ungallant to say the least, — Donald Margulies

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye. — David Ogilvy

But bad manners or vulgar gestures can sometimes have a touch of poetry about them, just enough not to arouse one's indignation. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

I've never turned blue in someone else's
bathroom. I consider that the height of bad
manners. — Keith Richards

War is a form of really bad manners, in a strange way. Invading a country I think is just the worst possible manners. 'You're not invited!' Gate crashing on a large scale! — Graydon Carter

By no means do I think that playing games online is wrong or rude. However, constantly sending requests is an act of bad manners as well as being very annoying to the one receiving them. — John Patrick Hickey

He remembered that his mother had a strong distaste for suicide, feeling that it combined three things of which she strongly disapproved - bad manners, cowardice, and sin. — John Steinbeck

It's the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture ... Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered. — Barbara Kingsolver

As a child, I was taught that it was bad manners to bring attention to yourself, and to never, ever make a spectacle of yourself ... all of which I've earned a living doing. — Audrey Hepburn

Jean Laffite was a sexy bad boy with a gentleman's manners and an air of barely suppressed danger. Every girl's secret dreamboat in other words. We always say we want a nice, hardworking, decent guy but we're lying to ourselves. - DJ Jaco — Suzanne Johnson

I don't like people being rude. Bad manners and arrogance make me cross. People making others feel uncomfortable. And I really don't like it in restaurants when people are rude or patronising to waiters. I feel like saying, 'They're not your slave'. But my knees only shake around once every five years. You're safe, don't worry. — Alan Titchmarsh

Most families would be healthier and happier if their members treated one another with the respect they would give to a perfect stranger. C. S. Lewis's discussion of storge, familial love, is endlessly instructive on this point and is required reading for all who intend to have a decent family life.1 He notes that he has been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parent. — Dallas Willard

I flick my turn signal on out of dumb habit, and because the end of the world's no excuse for bad driving manners. — Alexandra Bracken

Jilly looked at it with a sinking heart. It was difficult enough when the exotic, undeniably gorgeous creature of her fantasies had turned out to be an obnoxious bully. Of course he had to have a Harley, as well, completing the perfect bad-boy image. With the tattooed teardrops on his high cheekbones and spiky, waist-length, flame-colored hair and his long, leather-clad legs and pointy-toed cowboy boots, he was almost irresistible, despite his manners.
A Harley sealed the deal. He was all her adolescent fantasies come true.
And it was time to grow up. — Anne Stuart

In England it is bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a different opinion. — George Mikes

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad. — Lynne Truss