Rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to digest his words,
With better appetite. [ William Shakespeare ]

Vanity and rudeness are seldom seen together. [ Lavater ]

There are occasions on which all apology is rudeness. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life. [ Dr. Johnson ]

The natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety. [ Dr. Johnson ]

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon. [ Coleridge ]

Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it pointblank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several - from foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy. [ La Bruyere ]

Nothing is more silly than the pleasure some people take in speaking their minds. A man of this make will say a rude thing for the mere pleasure of saying it, when an opposite behavior, full as innocent, might have preserved his friend, or made his fortune. [ Steele ]

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight. [ Emerson ]