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
Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Ideas
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
A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
—Sydney J. Harris
Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Wealth, Being True to Yourself
Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Curiosity
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: Believe, Ideal, Ideals, Idealism
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
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
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
Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Decisions
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
Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
—Sydney J. Harris
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
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
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
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
A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Forgiveness
Just about the only interruption we don’t object to is applause.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Appreciation
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
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
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: Responsibility, Confidence, Maturity, Mistakes, Self-reliance, Failures
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: Teachers, Teaching
The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
—Sydney J. Harris
Topics: Stress, Relaxation
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
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
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 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
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Midge Decter American Journalist
- Mignon McLaughlin American Journalist
- Jim Bishop American Journalist
- John Mason Brown American Drama Critic
- Dorothy Dix American Journalist
- Howard Cosell American Journalist
- Leo Burnett American Advertising Executive
- Thomas Masson American Journalist
- Robert Quillen American Journalist
- Charles Kuralt American Journalist
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