We, uh, apologize for any violation of decorum, but as it turns out, it was absolutely necessary.

If you're not merely being polite, and you must tell me if that's the case, but if it genuinely does interest you, may I invite you to dine with me tonight, and it will be my pleasure and, indeed, my privilege to tell you

My mother even said that, in order to put my best foot forward, I had to be patient, alert and excruciatingly well-mannered.

Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book -- decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves.

Bill collectors call constantly, reading verbatim from a script before expressing polite sympathy for my plight and then demanding payment arrangements I can't possibly meet.

And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, "You know what, Tina, this isn't right for us, but thank you so much for sharing."

Tanzan politely offers his help, carrying the traveler on his back across the street, and placing her down without a word.

LT: I look for someone who has a sense of fun, who's audacious, who's forthcoming, who has politics, who has even a small scrap of passion for the planet, someone who's decent, has a sense of justice and who thinks I'm worthwhile.

(Laughter) You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady": Stick to the weather and your health.

So for example, if your date is smiling at you, this technology can help you to determine whether she actually likes you or she is just trying to be nice to you.

The other reason that people are not more civil is because they're skeptical and even concerned about being civil or appearing nice.

Being truly civil means doing the small things, like smiling and saying hello in the hallway, listening fully when someone's speaking to you.

Now, you can have strong opinions, disagree, have conflict or give negative feedback civilly, with respect.

In a biotechnology firm, colleagues and I found that those that were seen as civil were twice as likely to be viewed as leaders, and they performed significantly better.

But there's an even bigger story about how civility pays, and it ties to one of the most important questions around leadership: What do people want most from their leaders?

In most parts of the US, the baseline expectation in public is that we maintain a balance between civility and privacy.

When most people think about my homeland, Canada, today, if they think about Canada at all, they think cold, they think boring, they think polite.

Well, to start, it is not and cannot be the same thing as being respectful or polite, because we need civility precisely when we're dealing with those people that we find it the most difficult, or maybe even impossible, to respect.

And I know we were all taught not to talk about politics because it's not polite, but we need to be able to talk about it, because it's important to us and it's a part of who we are.

And the first is that I've been writing about manners and civility for more than 20 years, as a book author and as a magazine columnist.

So, in this talk, you're going to learn three new ways to be civil, I hope, and it will be according to the original definition of civility.

And after one such incident last year, even the Washington Post -- you know, left-leaning Washington Post -- wrote an editorial and sided with decorum.

So I doused him in cologne every day, which he thought was very nice, and therefore he brought bread and butter every day, which I had to eat out of courtesy.

The novel’s universal themes of morality, civility, and society have made it a literary classic, satirizing both conventions of its time and long held beliefs about humanity.

They even gather together in such groups as the Counter-Vandalism Unit -- "Civility, Maturity, Responsibility" -- to just clean up the pages.