Sydney J. Harris Quotes

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.

~ Sydney J. Harris

And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as symbols of family life. What they want are ideal children, not real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.

~ 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

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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

But in terms of psychological time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.

~ Sydney J. Harris

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

~ Sydney J. Harris

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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.

~ 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 lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere it is not this sort of licence 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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying It got lost and say I lost it.

~ Sydney J. Harris

People who won't help others in trouble because they got into trouble through their own fault would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning man until they learned whether he fell in through his own fault or not.

~ Sydney J. Harris

The true test of independent judgement is being able to dislike someone who admires us.

~ Sydney J. Harris

Ninety percent 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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying It got lost and say I lost it.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ Sydney J. Harris

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'

~ Sydney J. Harris

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ 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.

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ Sydney J. Harris

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

~ Sydney J. Harris