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
When I hear somebody sigh that “Life is hard,” I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Difficulty, Perspective, Attitude
Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a necessary evil, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Conscience
If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Anger
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: Argument, Arguments
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
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
Topics: Service
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
We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Pleasure
Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times. Some people are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Graduation, Education, One liners, Light
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: Carpe-diem, Repentance, Regret, Remorse
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
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
The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Ideals
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
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
Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with charge cards.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Food
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: Perseverance, Persistence
If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, “You Only Live Once.”
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Evil
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
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
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
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
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
Topics: Computers
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
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
There is no such thing as an “atrocity” in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
—Sydney J. Harris
Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Decisions
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
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 winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Forgiveness
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