Sydney J. Harris Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

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
Freud's prescription for personal happiness as consisting of work and love must be taken with the proviso that the work has to be loved, and the love has to be worked at.

Sydney J. Harris
The only "true church" is that which admits there is no way of knowing which denomination God belongs to.

Sydney J. Harris
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
The unfailing sign of a poor executive is that he reprimands his subordinates in public and commends them in private, when he should be doing exactly the opposite in order to elicit their best efforts.

Sydney J. Harris
It is the fear of being called a coward that makes most men courageous in a crisis; but real courage, which is rare, consists in doing what you know is right, regardless of what men may call you.

Sydney J. Harris
What a lot of damage a little word can do, if you don't understand what you are saying or what someone else is saying. Entire religious sects have been formed — and persecuted — because of disagreement about the meaning of a word.

Sydney J. Harris
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
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
A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.

Sydney J. Harris
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