Sydney J. Harris quotes

Sydney J. Harris was an American journalist and syndicated columnist, best known for his insightful essays on society and human behavior. His widely read columns in the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times touched on philosophy, education, and contemporary issues. He is remembered for his clear writing style and his ability to provoke thoughtful reflection among readers. Here are 134 of his quotes:

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

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

When I hear somebody sigh that "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

Sydney J. Harris

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...

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

Regret for the things we have done will be tempered by time. It is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

Sydney J. Harris

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".

Sydney J. Harris

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.

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

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.

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

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.

Sydney J. Harris

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.

Sydney J. Harris

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

Sydney J. Harris

The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.

Sydney J. Harris

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris

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

Sydney J. Harris