Sydney J. Harris Quotes

"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."

The beauty of “spacing” children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones — which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.

...it calls for deciding things on their own merit, not because you read it or were told it or grew up believing it.

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.

Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder — and turn quickly to my typewriter.

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.

Success is just a little more effort.

"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."

"The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions — those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time.
But those we are fighting and killing are people — men, women and children — not political, geographic or economic abstractions. They are, in the main, as decent and fearful and confused as we are. And they regard us as abstractions as much as we do them."

The people who are suspicious of certain things are the very ones who are the most capable of doing that of which they are suspicious.

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.

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.

The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to reamin the same but get better...

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.