Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
Interpretation
Good manners can create opportunities that knowledge alone cannot provide.
This quote emphasizes the importance of good manners and etiquette in facilitating success and access to opportunities. It suggests that while education is valuable, it is the ability to interact respectfully and courteously with others that truly opens doors in life, highlighting the social aspect of achievement over purely academic accomplishments.
In practice
In a job interview to emphasize the importance of how one presents oneself.
Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.
We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.
When I was a kid, we said that we were precluded from going to certain neighborhoods because of the color of our skin Now the neighborhoods are the neighborhoods of ideas, youre not supposed to be there because of the color of your skin.
The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Most people who decide to grow personally find their first mentors in the pages of books.
The Gospel which we possess was not given to us only to be admired, talked of, and professed - but to be practiced.
I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
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