Sydney J. Harris (1917–86) was an American syndicated essayist and drama critic for the Chicago Daily News and later Chicago Sun-Times. His weekday column, “Strictly Personal,” approached social and philosophical questions with a wry, humanist style.
Born in London, Harris’s family moved to the United States when he was five years old. He grew up in Chicago and spent the rest of his life there. After studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, he became a drama critic and a columnist for the Chicago Daily News in 1944. He held those positions until the paper ended in 1978 and then wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times until his death.
Harris’s “Strictly Personal” column was distributed to more than 200 American and Canadian newspapers by the Times of London syndicate. He used his background in philosophy and research to write about the contemporary world, human behavior, societal norms, faith, hypocrisy, and art in an intellectual, yet folksy style.
Collections of Harris’s columns were assembled into 11 books, including Strictly Personal (1953,) Majority of One (1957,) Pieces of Eight (1982,) and Clearing the Ground (1986.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Cynicism, Criticism
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
Freud’s prescription for personal happiness as consisting of work and love must be taken with the proviso that the work has to be loved, and the love has to be worked at.
—Sydney J. Harris
Man’s unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Identity
Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Being True to Yourself, Wealth
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.
—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
Topics: Democracy, Government
Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Ideas
Just about the only interruption we don’t object to is applause.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Appreciation
People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Generosity
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.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Dissent
Young people know less than we do, but they understand more; their perception has not yet been blunted by compromise, fatigue, rationalization, and the mistaking of mere respectability for morality.
—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
Have you ever noticed that it is generally the same people who talk about the need for incentive to make a man work successfully, who resent the idea of incentive to make a man think successfully?
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Work
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.”
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Confidence, Maturity, Self-reliance, Failures, Responsibility, Mistakes
By the time a man asks you for advice, he has generally made up his mind what he wants to do, and is looking for confirmation rather than counseling.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Advice
The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love — possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy — are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry.
—Sydney J. Harris
When I hear somebody sigh that “Life is hard,” I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Perspective, Difficulty, Attitude
Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Promises
Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with charge cards.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Food
Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something, without feeling the necessity to prove someone else is wrong.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Maturity
A general practitioner is a doctor who treats what you’ve got; a specialist is a doctor who finds you’ve got what he treats.
—Sydney J. Harris
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Repentance, Regret, Carpe-diem, Remorse
If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, “You Only Live Once.”
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Evil
Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Teaching, Teachers
Superior people are only those who let it be discovered by others; the need to make it evident forfeits the very virtue they aspire to.
—Sydney J. Harris
A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Forgiveness
There are some things people can do to change and some things they cannot do — character can be formed, but temperament is given. And the strong who cannot bend are just as much to be pitied as the weak who cannot stiffen.
—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
Topics: Discipline, Ethics, Morals
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.
—Sydney J. Harris
The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained.
—Sydney J. Harris
There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Forgiveness
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.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Arguments, Argument
The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Relaxation, Stress
Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.
—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
Work and play are an artificial pair of opposites, because the best kind of play contains an element of work, and the most productive kind of work must include something of the spirit of play.
—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
Topics: Mistakes
The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Ideals
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Education
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