Sydney J. Harris Quotes

Our speech accurately reflects the prejudices of the ruling group. Since the rulers and the rich and the educated (who directed language) generally lived in cities, we developed such words as "villain," which meant a rustic; "heathen" and "pagan," which also indicated those who dwelt in the country; "boor," which meant a farmer; and many other such words which downgraded rural inhabitants.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.

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 ...

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

Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.

Somebody once said that good conversation should be like a tennis match, with each player gracefully sending the ball back across the net; instead, most conversation is like a golf game, with each player stroking only his own ball, and waiting impatiently for the other to finish.

Just as communism always begins with an appeal to "humanity" and equality" and ends with inhuman despotism, so does fascism always begin with an appeal to "nationalism" and "individualism," and ends with a military collectivism far worse than the disease it purports to cure.

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

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

Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.

The French may be straining the truth in their famous saying that "to understand all is to forgive all"," but it is certainly true that the more we know of any given person, the harder it becomes to hate him.

Why are we willing to accept a new mathematical formula we don't understand as the product of a brilliant mind, while rejecting a new art form we don't understand as the product of a deranged mind?

At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach - it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.

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.

The whole world is a gigantic legacy. Imagine having to start afresh each generation: who would invent the wheel, devise the lever, construct the alphabet and multiplication table? I could not; could you?

The loner may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself.

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

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.

We truly possess only what we are able to renounce; otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.

Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.

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.

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

The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.

It's odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are "morally offensive" so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry.

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.

Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves
so how can we know anyone else?

All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he is in a hopeless bind. His goals have been set for him by his milieu, and he cannot be his own man; so he simply refuses to play the game. He does not try.

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

Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.

We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.

Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.

"Terrorism" is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; "war" is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify 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.

Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.

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

Regret for things we have done can be tempered by time, it is regret for things we have not done that is inconsolable.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.

As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress.

And that is the beautiful thing about friendship: we can take liberties, we can show our frailer side, we can afford the vast luxury of giving way to our boredom when we are bored, our anger when we are angry, our peckishness when we feel downhearted.

This is a lesson mankind has not yet learned. We identify, and stratify, and treat persons largely on the basis of their accidental (physical) characteristics, which have no deeper meaning.

Patriotism is wanting what is best for your country. Nationalism is thinking your country is best, no matter what it does.

Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady.

Like all persecuted minority groups, they strike back by forming cabals, by "taking over" certain spheres of activity (in the arts, for instance), and by purposely provocative behavior.

It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light - and the next tunnel.

Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable - they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims.

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.

What we are looking for, I am afraid, is neither a true leader nor a true Messiah, but a false Messiah - a man who will give us over-simplified answers, who will justify our ways, who will castigate our enemies, who will vindicate our selfishness as a way of life and make us comfortable within our prejudices and preconceptions.

And marriage, generally, requires an exquisite sense of timing. As a single person, time is relative to one's needs and demands; as a married partner, time is a joint venture - the husband may be an hour late getting home, while dinner grows cold; the wife may be an hour late dressing for a party, while her mate grows hot under the collar. Time does not belong to us alone; we share it with those we love, those we work for, those we play with. It is an elastic concept: we must, as we grow older, be willing to be bored for someone else's sake. And it can be as fatal to be stingy with our time as with our money.

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

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

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.

We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.

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

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

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

This is the pattern of gun killings in big cities. Most homicides are not professional jobs, in felonious pursuits, but are committed by relatives, friends or neighbors, in the home or nearby. They are sparked by liquor, by lust, by jealousy, or greed, or a burning sense of injustice. And most are committed by people with no previous record of violence. It is these who will be restrained by stricter gun laws, who will find it much harder to go home, pick up a gun and shoot an adversary. The liquor will pass, the lust will die, reflection will replace passion if the instrument of death is not so readily available.

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.

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

Just about the only interruption we don't object to is applause.

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.

Time is love, above all else. It is the most precious commodity in the world and should be lavished on those we care most about.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

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.

Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.

Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.

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.

The best combination of parents consists of a father who is gentle beneath his firmness, and a mother who is firm beneath her gentleness.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

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.

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

The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.

The founder of every creed from Jesus Christ to Karl Marx, would be appalled to return to earth and see what has been made of that creed, not by its enemies, but by its most devoted adherents.

A truly successful person knows how to overcome the past, use the present, and prepare for the future-but unless we can first surmount the past, we cannot effectively cope with either the present or the future.

All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Experience can be a very bad teacher, indeed, or not teacher at all. It is like the silly phrase, "Practice makes perfect." In most cases, practice merely confirms us in our errors, and the longer we do something the wrong way - that is, without enlightenment and instruction- the more fixed we become in our folly.

If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, "You Only Live Once."

See him as the child he was.

Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer - for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.

No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his "philosophy of life" until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies.

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.

Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.

Being yourself is not remaining where you are, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure.

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.

Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.

But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, often frighten off the average person from the free development of this appetite.

When a man's position in life depends upon his having a certain opinion, that's the opinion he will have.

Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

A good talker is sensitive to expression, to tone and color and inflection in human speech. Because he himself is articulate, he can help others to articulate their half-formulated feelings. His mind fills in the gaps, and he becomes, in Socrates' words, a kind of midwife for ideas that are struggling to be born.

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.

In most cases, it gives a false impression of my views - but when i am confronting an extremist, I become a passionate defender of the opposite view... This, of course, is a senseless way to behave; it is over-reacting to a situation. But, in all fairness, there is something about extremism that breeds its own opposite.

Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.

But what is significant is that if you don't want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don't matter, and the reasons are never as 'reasonable' as we like to think they are.

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 only way to avoid trouble is to avoid living.