Sydney J. Harris Quotes

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set...

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.

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

When a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he mea...

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?...

The true test of independent judgement is being able to dislike someone who admires us.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that...

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably but they signify qui...

People who won't help others in trouble "because they got into trouble through their own fault" woul...

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field...

A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a los...

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.

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

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us...

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

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his aud...

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

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

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend ...

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret...

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child be...

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe a...

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time what we really want is for things to...

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify qui...

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying ...

Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves their abilities their f...

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying ...

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own persona...

But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, ...

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere it is not this sort of licence that distinguishes ...

The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is tha...

At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it is to inspire the desire for learn...

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

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for wh...

But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by anci...

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that ...

I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not p...

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but m...

All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is h...

And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachme...

Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his ...