Sydney J. Harris Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

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
American parents, on the whole, do not want their sons to be artisans or craftsmen, but business or professional people. As a result, millions of youngsters are being prepared for careers they have little aptitude for - and little interest in except for dubious prestige.

Sydney J. Harris
The frightening thing about bigotry is that it creates, shapes and solidifies the very element it dislikes.

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

Sydney J. Harris
Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.

Sydney J. Harris
All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.

Sydney J. Harris
Why do so many people yearn for an eternal life when they don't even know what to do with themselves in this brief one?

Sydney J. Harris
The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference, injustice and the use of others as means rather than ends in themselves.

Sydney J. Harris
Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.

Sydney J. Harris
If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.

Sydney J. Harris
Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.

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

Sydney J. Harris
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.

Sydney J. Harris
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.

Sydney J. Harris
What the ordinary person means by a 'miracle' is some gross distortion or suspension of the laws of nature... but life itself strikes him as commonplace, when in truth a blade of grass or a neuron in the brain is a greater miracle...

Sydney J. Harris
If you want to know what a man's character is really like... ask him to tell you the living person he most admires - for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature.

Sydney J. Harris
Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.

Sydney J. Harris
The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.

Sydney J. Harris
The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be somebody.

Sydney J. Harris
The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.

Sydney J. Harris
History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.

Sydney J. Harris