A Quote by Judith Martin
The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who 'graze' from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.
Now, all America sits in front of television sets and those television sets exude, I am sorry to say, a considerable amount of radioactive material. It's not huge, you know, but it's enough so that people who have made a habit of watching TV ... get the TV radiation.
You shouldn't have to win the boss lottery in order to have a little bit of flexibility at work. Raising and supporting a family isn't just a financial obligation. What's important isn't just being able to put food on the dinner table - we want you to be at the dinner table, too.
One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.
I could stand on my head and flick the bean right there at the dinner table and my mom would be all, "Honey, Christmas is family time, we should be together" and make me finish in front of everyone.
Growing up, one of the shows that the entire family ate dinner at the table was 'Star Trek: The Next Generation.' That was one of the greatest television shows ever, and then I'm a fan of 'Firefly.'
Our family dinner table was my first platform - every dinner was all about sharing stories and jokes and points of view.
To us the family is the cornerstone of civilization and must ever be. It is the foundation of proper human relationships.
There is a long history of newspapers being doomed. They were doomed by radio. They were doomed by television. They were probably doomed by the telegraph way back when.
I didn't grow up in a traditional family, and I never had a family dinner around the table, so whenever I actually had a dinner 'plan,' it meant a lot to me; it made me feel excited and safe.
In every civilization, life grows easier. Men grow lazier in consequence. We have a picture of what happened to the individual Greek. (I cannot look at history, or at any human action, except as I look at the individual.) The Greeks had good food, good witty talk, pleasant dinner parties; and they were content. When the individual man had reached that condition in Athens, when the thought not of giving to the state but of what the state could give to him, Athens' freedom was doomed.
Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.
I guess what really forms you as a person is what you do within your family to receive love or attention. In my family, what you had to do to receive attention was to have good conversation at the dinner table or for me to do well at school, and those were really my focuses because that was what was valued the most.
Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications?
The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.
It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline.
Related Authors
Brian Tracy Quotes
American
Author
Cassandra Clare Quotes
American
Author
Frederick Lenz Quotes
American
Author
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
American
Author
J. K. Rowling Quotes
English
Author
Jodi Picoult Quotes
American
Author
John Green Quotes
American
Author
Joyce Meyer Quotes
American
Author
Marianne Williamson Quotes
American
Author
Neil Gaiman Quotes
British
Author
Richelle Mead Quotes
American
Author
Rick Riordan Quotes
American
Author
Robert Kiyosaki Quotes
American
Author
Stephen King Quotes
American
Author
Terry Pratchett Quotes
English
Author
Virginia Woolf Quotes
British
Author