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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Persistence, Perseverance
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
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
There is no such thing as an “atrocity” in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
—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
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
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
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
Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Tolerance
People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.
—Sydney J. Harris
Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
—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
Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable.
—Sydney J. Harris
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 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
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
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.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Ideals, Believe, Ideal, Idealism
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; because, though rational argument may take us to the edge of belief, we require a “leap of faith” to jump the chasm.
—Sydney J. Harris
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
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
Topics: Age
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: Maturity, Failures, Mistakes, Self-reliance, Responsibility, Confidence
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 core in the mystery of what we call personality resides in the individual mix between character and temperament.
—Sydney J. Harris
The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Stress, Relaxation
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Mignon McLaughlin American Journalist
Midge Decter American Journalist
Jim Bishop American Journalist
Dorothy Dix American Journalist
Howard Cosell American Journalist
John Mason Brown American Columnist
Leo Burnett American Advertising Executive
B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
Dorothy Thompson American Journalist