Sydney J Harris quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Sydney J Harris

Top Sydney J Harris Quotes

Browse top 82 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Sydney J Harris.

Favorite Sydney J Harris Quotes

1. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

2. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

3. "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case." --" ~ Sydney J. Harris

4. "Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway" ~ Sydney J. Harris

5. "Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is." ~ Sydney J. Harris

6. "The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician." ~ Sydney J. Harris

7. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

8. "Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us." ~ Sydney J. Harris

9. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

10. "Take away grievances from some people and you remove their reasons for living; most of us are nourished by hope, but a considerable minority get psychic nutrition from their resentments, and would waste away purposelessly without them." ~ Sydney J. Harris

11. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

12. "All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he is in a hopeless bind. His goals have been set for him by his milieu, and he cannot be his own man; so he simply refuses to play the game. He "does not try." ~ Sydney J. Harris

13. "But what is significant is that if you don't want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don't matter, and the reasons are never as ‘reasonable' as we like to think they are." ~ Sydney J. Harris

14. "In most cases, it gives a false impression of my views - but when i am confronting an extremist, I become a passionate defender of the opposite view... This, of course, is a senseless way to behave; it is over-reacting to a situation. But, in all fairness, there is something about extremism that breeds its own opposite." ~ Sydney J. Harris

15. "The Unconvincibles are the people who are not amenable to reason of any sort. Their minds are not only closed, but bolted and hermetically sealed. In most cases , their beliefs congealed at an early age; by the time they left their teens, they were encased in a rigid framework of thought and feeling, which no evidence or argument can penetrate." ~ Sydney J. Harris

16. "When a man's position in life depends upon his having a certain opinion, that's the opinion he will have." ~ Sydney J. Harris

17. "Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents." ~ Sydney J. Harris

18. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

19. "As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it." ~ Sydney J. Harris

20. "And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent." ~ Sydney J. Harris

21. "An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run." ~ Sydney J. Harris

22. "Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'" ~ Sydney J. Harris

23. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

24. "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." ~ Sydney J. Harris

25. "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?" ~ Sydney J. Harris

26. "Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be." ~ Sydney J. Harris

27. "Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them." ~ Sydney J. Harris

28. "It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness." ~ Sydney J. Harris

29. "We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it." ~ Sydney J. Harris

30. "Yet, advice on what we can do is usually futile—for we will do nothing except applaud the speaker, accept those ideas of his we already agree with, and reject those ideas that run counter to our prejudices." ~ Sydney J. Harris

31. "Achieving the good life is more a matter of being than of doing or giving. It calls for intense self-scrutiny, a relentless honesty about one's motives, and a persistent feeling that we are no better—and perhaps worse—than those we are trying to help." ~ Sydney J. Harris

32. "We must also learn that time itself is indivisible, that every act is a blending of past experience, present situation and future expectancy." ~ Sydney J. Harris

33. "A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person." ~ Sydney J. Harris

34. "Being able to do exactly as one pleases is the surest way to remain perpetually unpleased." ~ Sydney J. Harris

35. "The way in which we say something is often more important than what we say." ~ Sydney J. Harris

36. "Patriotism is wanting what is best for your country. Nationalism is thinking your country is best, no matter what it does." ~ Sydney J. Harris

37. "The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love — possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy — are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry." ~ Sydney J. Harris

38. "Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped." ~ Sydney J. Harris

39. "All love relationships are controlled by an element of fear—that of acting, or becoming, unworthy of the loved one's approbation." ~ Sydney J. Harris

40. "When a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he means—for there can be no knowledge without words; there can only be feelings." ~ Sydney J. Harris

41. "The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." ~ Sydney J. Harris

42. "When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'" ~ Sydney J. Harris

43. "Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." ~ Sydney J. Harris

44. "The time to relax is when you don't have time for it." ~ Sydney J. Harris

45. "The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong'." ~ Sydney J. Harris

46. "It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others." ~ Sydney J. Harris

47. "If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?" ~ Sydney J. Harris

48. "A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive." ~ Sydney J. Harris

49. "Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men." ~ Sydney J. Harris

50. "At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel." ~ Sydney J. Harris

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