Sydney J. Harris Quotes

As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.

When we inform, we lead from strength; when we communicate, we lead from weakness—and it is precisely this confession of mortality that engages the ears, heads and hearts of those we want to enlist as allies in a common cause.

Just about the only interruption we don't object to is applause.

This is a lesson mankind has not yet learned. We identify, and stratify, and treat persons largely on the basis of their accidental (physical) characteristics, which have no deeper meaning.

A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.

People decline invitations when they are "indisposed" physically, and I wish they would do likewise when they feel indisposed emotionally. A person has no more right to attend a party with a head full of venom than with a throat full of virus.

We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.

Time is love, above all else. It is the most precious commodity in the world and should be lavished on those we care most about.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.

Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

Every rule in the book can be broken, except one - be who you are, and become all you were meant to be.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress.

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.

It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.

Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with credit cards.

When a baseball player makes an error, it goes into the record and is published. How many of us could stand this sort of daily scrutiny?

The paradox of friendship is that it is both the strongest thing in the world and the most fragile. Wild horses cannot separate friends, but whining words can. A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.

When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.

Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.

The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying.

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love -- takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare.

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.