Quotes By Sydney J. Harris

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

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

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?

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

Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.

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".

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.

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.

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

Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.

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.

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.

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

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

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

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

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.

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.

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.

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

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.

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

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

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.

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

People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault.

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

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.