civility

Civility is not about dousing strongly held views. It's about making sure that people are willing to respect other perspectives.

The candor of a civilized mind comes from the ability to question self before action; the reverse is the case for the creative mind; act first, then question later.

the veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin

Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.

Civility is not a specific code of behavior as much as it is a call to unrelenting preemptive thought, and steady effort to care about influence on others.

Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.

Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.

If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the __ystified_ form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other__ gifts _ recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year__ present once again _ ) _the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person__ gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the __re-economy of the economy,_ its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlach is simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.

Democracy is the worst insult to any society that is increasingly secular and growing in incivility for there it is more abused than used.

It is not enough just to be good. We must be good for something. We must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for our presence. And the good that is in us must be spread to others. This is the measure of our civility.

The system wears a mask of civility, yet will quickly reveal its true nature in the form of magnificently-purposed violence when needed.

Be wary of those propagating too much about liberty, ideology, and civility; they just might be oppressors in the making.

He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.

Be civilized. Grudges are for Neanderthals. _ Hubert Humphrey

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of par- ents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have termi- nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat- ters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously some- times of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?