“ if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them. ”
 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934). copy citation

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“"There's too much good manners," he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh. "Well, I think that's nice," said Baby. "No, it isn't," he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. "Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."
"I think Americans take their manners rather seriously," said the elder Englishman. "I guess so," said Dick. "My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days when you shot first and apologized afterward.” source

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