A Quote by Honore de Balzac

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Honore de Balzac

Quote Topics

Hypocrisy Manners Nation

Quote Author

Honore de Balzac
French - Novelist
May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Alexis de Tocqueville

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling in the nation must be quickened, the conscience of the nation must be roused, the propriety of the nation must be startled, the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed: and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

Frederick Douglass

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

George Bernard Shaw

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Horace Mann

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Flannery O'Connor

We're a nation of latchkey children. Manners start at home, and no one is at home teaching manners so that children have respect for others.

Letitia Baldrige

If an armed nation were a polite nation, America would be paradise. We have more than 200 million guns in private owernship here. But our manners are not getting better.

Molly Ivins

Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.

Bari Weiss

Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

Peter Kreeft

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

John McGahern

There used to be an art form called the 'comedy of manners.' Why aren't comedies of manners made now in this country? The answer is simple. We no longer have manners to speak of.

Steve Allen

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Hypocrisy means deliberately pretending. None of us lives up to his ideals; none of us is all that he would like to be or all that he could be in Christ. But that is not hypocrisy. Falling short of our ideals is not hypocrisy. Pretending we have reached our ideals when we have not - that is hypocrisy.

Warren W. Wiersbe

Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?

Milan Kundera

This is another thing which I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people.