Aging & Wisdom Quote by Fran Lebowitz

Lebowitz is doing that classic New York maneuver: sounding like she’s lecturing you about manners when she’s really indicting a whole economic ethos. The line opens with “moral value,” not “taste” or “preference,” which is the tell. She’s not interested in etiquette as decorative social choreography; she’s arguing that behavior is the only credible proof of character in a culture where status can be bought, curated, or inherited. Money, in this frame, is a stress test: if you “have a lot” and still move through the world with softness, you’ve resisted the gravitational pull of entitlement.

“Courtesy in the old sense” is the quote’s sly pivot. Lebowitz doesn’t romanticize the past so much as weaponize it. She reaches back to a pre-brand, pre-therapeutic definition of politeness as an inner discipline: “politeness of the heart.” That phrase strips manners of their performative sheen and relocates them in the realm of impulse control and imagination - the willingness to treat other people as fully real even when you don’t need anything from them. In a city where service workers absorb the moods of the powerful, “gentleness of the spirit” becomes less a personality trait than an ethical obligation.

The subtext is as sharp as it is simple: rudeness is not authenticity, it’s a luxury good. Lebowitz’s disgust (“repellent”) isn’t prudishness; it’s a refusal to let privilege launder itself through charisma. She’s drawing a boundary line: if wealth can’t purchase decency, then decency is the last remaining status that matters.