Sydney J. Harris Quotes

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.

"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." —

Many marriages falter, it seems to me, not because the couples are out of love, but because they have never been friends as much as lovers. They may love each other, in a vaporously romantic way, but they do not really like each other as individual personalities.

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.

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

The way in which we say something is often more important than what we say.

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.

A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably excuses himself to himself by saying, "I'm only human, after all."

"Somebody once said that if many people had not read about romantic love and seen it on the screen, they would never look for it themselves. I believe this. And along with it I believe that if many people were not ashamed to be thought deficient in "family feeling" they would never have children."

See him as the child he was.

"Long ago I used to mutter (as you probably do), "Very interesting," and cast a desperate glance around for the punch-bowl. This banal comment fools no one, least of all the artist, and you quickly find you have lost a friend and alienated a roomful of people, all of whom are pretending they like the pictures with a grim kind of appreciation."

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

Parents should learn to stop nagging their children about how well they could do “if you only tried more, or cared more.” Trying and caring, in specific areas, is built into people; or else it comes to them later, if they mature properly; or it never comes at all. But it is dead certain that no young person was ever motivated by a querulous, disappointed parent more concerned with his own pride than with the child’s ultimate self-actualization.

Ordinary people, caught in the trap of their routine lives, are not villains any more than eccentrics or rebels are villains. Essentially, both kinds of people are struggling to be good, through a maze of conflicts and a haze of shadows.