Success has a knack of making one complacent, but failure can keep one rooted firmly on the ground.
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.
We humans can get used to anything. It really is remarkable. The problem is that we often use this glorious ability of ours to stay stuck in mediocrity. Oh, the years we waste adapting to lousy marriages, soul-sucking jobs, being friends with people who are rude to waitresses.
Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.
Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.
Do I ever get questions that are rude or impertinent? Yes, but I love to use them. The audience immediately perceives the emotional awkwardness of the situation.
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
Wearing a baseball cap or sleeveless shirt in a white-tablecloth restaurant is rude and makes other diners upset, just like someone on a cellphone.
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.
When I moved to England, at 19, I had a rude awakening. I knew it would be chilly but when I saw leaves falling off the trees I thought someone had dropped a nuclear something!
The child now shewed her a narrow and rugged descent, made by cutting the red clay and stones, of which the cliffs are here composed, into a sort of rude steps.
I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch 'Titanic,' and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie.
I'm crass, contemptuous and crude, obstreperous, obnoxious, rambunctiously raw and rude.
A polite enemy is just as difficult to discredit, as a rude friend is to protect.
I always try to be nice. I never want to be that person that anyone perceives as being rude or disrespectful, 'cause that's not me at all.
I have never really encountered anybody that was rude to me. Well, not to my face anyway.
Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.
God drove Cain out of his presence and sent him into exile far away from his native land, so that he passed from a life of human kindness to one which was more akin to the rude existence of a wild beast.
