I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of moral behavior and genuine kindness in interpersonal interactions.
Fran Lebowitz underscores the significance of courtesy as a reflection of one's moral values. She suggests that true politeness goes beyond mere social niceties; it is a deep-seated gentleness and consideration for others that should guide one's behavior, especially for those with privilege or abundance.
In practice
In a speech about leadership qualities, one might invoke this quote to discuss the role of moral integrity in effective leadership.
Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.
You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.
Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.
I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.
As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.
The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned.
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