A Quote by Fran Lebowitz

Polite conversation is rarely either.

Fran Lebowitz

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Communication Conversation Either Polite Polite Conversation Rarely

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Fran Lebowitz
American - Journalist
Born: October 27, 1950

I'm a constant idiot in conversation - I always seem to sound either smug or stupid. Writing plays was a way of winning the conversation by controlling the conversation.

Jack Thorne

I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.

W. H. Auden

Very rarely does food enhance the conversation. If the food is really good, there'll be much less conversation because you'd be concentrating too much on the food.

Richard Lugar

There was a nice dilemma. How does one interject into a polite conversation, "By the way, in case you're ever interested, I do have a penise."?

Brent Weeks

Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.

Jonathan Swift

All the research shows that the presence of that phone will do two things to the conversation. It will make the conversation go to trivial matters, and it will decrease the amount of empathy that the two people in the conversation feel toward each other. That phone is a signal that either of us can put our attention elsewhere.

Judy Woodruff

If a person feels terrible, it usually should not be shown or acknowledged during a greeting exchange. Instead, the unhappy person is expected to conceal negative feelings, putting on a polite smile to accompany the “Just fine, thank you, and how are you?” reply to the “How are you today?” The true feelings will probably go undetected, not because the smile is such a good mask but because in polite exchanges people rarely care how the other person actually feels.

Paul Ekman

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

Sam Harris

I grew up in a family where the women were just nuts. They didn't stand around in cardigans making polite conversation while they chopped tomatoes.

Nadia Giosia

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

Samuel Beckett

It's not always easy to make polite, lunchtime conversation with a mother who for decades has had international leaders and statesmen to engage with in potentially world-changing discussions.

Carol Thatcher

Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.

John Yoo

A dearth of words a woman need not fear; But 'tis a task indeed to learn to hear: In that the skill of conversation lies; That shows and makes you both polite and wise.

Edward Young

Bill Shorten should - either knows that or at least he should know it and for him to change the conversation by proposing - by suggesting a proposal significantly more adventurous than where the conversation has been up until now was a very unhelpful intervention.

George Brandis

The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.

Henry David Thoreau

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Simone de Beauvoir

A Quote by Fran Lebowitz

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