Sydney J. Harris Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

Sydney J. Harris
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
I would rather stay up late arguing with friends than get a good night's sleep.

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

Sydney J. Harris
A "consultant" is more often than not a person brought in to find out what has gone wrong, by the people who made it go wrong, in the comfortable expectation that he will not bite the hand that feeds him by placing the blame where it belongs.

Sydney J. Harris
The Germans call delinquent boys who hang around in gangs the halbstark, meaning the 'half-strong,' which is a true and accurate description of what they are and how they feel. Someone who feels really strong doesn't have to act that way.

Sydney J. Harris
Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason; because, though rational argument may take us to the edge of belief, we require a "leap of faith" to jump the chasm.

Sydney J. Harris
Take the two popular words today, information and communication. They are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.

Sydney J. Harris
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
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
Homosexuality, in almost all cases, is no more a matter of sexual preference than my left-handedness is a matter of manual preference.

Sydney J. Harris
What perverse instinct prompts people who are getting off at the second floor to push themselves to the rear of a crowded elevator?

Sydney J. Harris
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
The strange thing about science is that if you have only a slight and superficial acquaintance with it, you are likely to lose your religious beliefs; but if you bother to delve somewhat more deeply, you are just as likely to renew and confirm your reverence for creation.

Sydney J. Harris
It is true that the first book of the Bible commands us to "be fruitful and multiply" — but that was depicting a time when the total human population of the Earth was two.

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

Sydney J. Harris
Young people know less than we do, but they understand more; their perception has not yet been blunted by compromise, fatigue, rationalization, and the mistaking of mere respectability for morality.

Sydney J. Harris
People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault.

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

Sydney J. Harris
My chief objection to the self-made man is that he is so pleased with his maker.

Sydney J. Harris
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
Superior people are only those who let it be discovered by others; the need to make it evident forfeits the very virtue they aspire to.

Sydney J. Harris
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.

Sydney J. Harris
Life is unfair in that a plane crash may kill innocent people or spare some worthless ones and maim the useful. Anything can happen to anybody at any time, regardless of merit or worth. But precisely because of this we have a special obligation to see that fairness works wherever we have the power to make it work.

Sydney J. Harris
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
Most parents don't realize that trying to win a child's love without first gaining his respect is the surest way to make him contemptuously disobedient.

Sydney J. Harris
There are only three things that no man will believe about himself — that his sense of humor is deficient, that he is not well-bred, and that he is not somehow appealing to women.

Sydney J. Harris
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
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