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 real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.

"The sullen workman who is afraid of being imposed upon is secretly convinced of his own inferiority — when he has to say, or think, "I'm as good as any man," he doesn't quite believe it himself."

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.

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...

As Bernard Shaw said, “He who can, does: he who cannot, teaches.” But, as Sydney J. Harris put it, “Let’s revise Shaw’s foolish saying to ‘He who can, does; he who understands, teaches.

The length of sentences depends upon the criminal’s wealth and type of legal help more than upon the seriousness of his transgression. Court procedures are slow and cumbersome. It is the poor and stupid criminal who gets the heaviest sentences - so the aim of criminals is to become rich and cunning, and thus avoid the harshest penalties.

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

Genuine contentment is found in performing tasks that take us out of ourselves, for a purpose greater than ourselves. Only when the personality is subordinated to a higher goal do we attain the serenity we are looking for.

For most people read not with their minds, but with their emotions and prejudices. They read into or read out of a piece of writing what they want to. And when they disagree, it is usually not with what the writer says, but with what they imagine he said... People filter what they read through the fine strainer of their feelings and preconceptions, their prejudices and fears.

"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.

We must also learn that time itself is indivisible, that every act is a blending of past experience, present situation and future expectancy.

It’s surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you’re not comfortable within yourself, you can’t be comfortable with others.

Ninety percent of what we believe has nothing to do with the process of thought, but comes instead from the four sources of family inheritance, individual temperament, national culture, and economic self-interest; and while we cannot wholly cast off these shackles, we should at least recognize their cramping and distorting influence upon the free process of thought.