Life & Wisdom Quote by Judith Martin

It is an exquisitely prim rebuke disguised as common sense: if you toss out ideals because people fail them, you are not being realistic, you are giving up your only leverage against cruelty. Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, writes from the deceptively domestic territory of etiquette, where the stakes are always bigger than salad forks. Her intent here is to defend standards not as moral vanity, but as social infrastructure: the rules we keep precisely because we are unreliable.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial. “Most people can’t live up to them” isn’t an argument for lowering the bar; it’s an admission that the bar is doing its job. Ideals are not a participation trophy. They are friction. They slow our worst impulses, even when we regularly skid against them. Martin’s phrasing also exposes a common rhetorical dodge: the appeal to majority failure as permission. If enough people cheat, we start calling cheating “human nature.” If enough people are rude, we relabel it “honesty.” The ugliness arrives when we stop treating lapses as lapses and instead redesign the culture around them.

Context matters because Martin is an etiquette columnist, and etiquette is often mocked as superficial. She flips that: manners are the everyday performance of a society’s claimed ideals, especially equality and restraint. The line reads like a warning about civic life in miniature. Abandon the aspiration to be decent because decency is hard, and you don’t get authenticity; you get escalation, entitlement, and a public sphere that rewards the loudest appetite.