Genteel quotes:

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Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel. -- Thomas Hardy
Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. -- Rosemary Mahoney
I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made. -- Amy Vanderbilt
Everyone's surprised when they meet me. I guess it's because I've played tough cookies for so long... It's what I do best. I'm not sure I could pull off a genteel Southern belle. -- Rhea Perlman
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A lot of people say, 'I always knew Lucky Luciano as a very smooth, very elegant, very powerful man.' All the accounts of him as an older man were that he was very genteel but he still had the look of smothered violence behind his eyes. -- Vincent Piazza
A rude nature is worse than a brute nature by so much more as man is better than a beast: and those that are of civil natures and genteel dispositions are as much nearer to celestial creatures as those that are rude and cruel are to devils. -- Margaret Cavendish
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. -- Terry Pratchett
Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. -- Rosemary Mahoney
Franchot Tone is nuttier than a fruitcake, so don't let the genteel frosting fool you. -- Burgess Meredith
Confound my genteel upbringing! I could not think of any name foul enough to call him. -- Nancy Springer
A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art. -- Lord Chesterfield
But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized. -- Shane Koyczan
The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling. -- Marshall McLuhan
The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly. -- Oliver Goldsmith
... in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service. -- George Eliot
There's an obsession, within our culture, with the genteel thief. Somebody who commits a crime, but does it in a classy way. -- Geoffrey Gray
There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel. -- William Hazlitt
I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs. -- David Brooks
The Australian form of self-respect, however rough-and-ready, heart-of-gold, come-and-take-pot-luck-with-us, and matily extrovert it is, essentially, genteel, ingrowing, self-pitying, vanilla-ice-cream hearted, its central fear a fear of intellect. -- Hal Porter
Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view. -- Ian Mcewan
It seemed any young woman at odds with her place in life--be she a genteel lady or a serving girl--might find a happier home within the pages of a book. -- Tessa Dare
(Americans think we Brits drink tea because we're polite and genteel or something, whereas we really drink it because it's a stimulant and it's hot enough to sterilize cholera bacteria.)" -- Charles Stross
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull. -- Sinclair Lewis

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