Top 140 Sydney J. Harris Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “When a baseball player makes an error, it goes into the record and is published. How many of us could stand this sort of daily scrutiny?”

— Sydney J. Harris

103. “It may be true that the weak will always be driven to the wall; but it is the task of a just society to see that the wall is climbable.”

— Sydney J. Harris

104. “A ‘penchant for telling the truth’ can cripple a candidates chances faster than being caught in flagrante delicto with the governor’s wife.”

— Sydney J. Harris

105. “God cannot be solemn, or he would not have blessed man with the incalculable gift of laughter.”

— Sydney J. Harris

106. “The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.”

— Sydney J. Harris

107. “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

108. “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

109. “As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress.”

— Sydney J. Harris

110. “Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.”

— Sydney J. Harris

111. “Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.”

— Sydney J. Harris

112. “Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with credit cards.”

— Sydney J. Harris

113. “Parents should learn to stop nagging their children about how well they could do “if you only tried more, or cared more.” Trying and caring, in specific areas, is built into people; or else it comes to them later, if they mature properly; or it never comes at all. But it is dead certain that no young person was ever motivated by a querulous, disappointed parent more concerned with his own pride than with the child’s ultimate self-actualization.”

— Sydney J. Harris

114. “Many people feel “guilty” about things they shouldn’t feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.”

— Sydney J. Harris

115. “Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.”

— Sydney J. Harris

116. “When we inform, we lead from strength; when we communicate, we lead from weakness – and it is precisely this confession of mortality that engages the ears, heads and hearts of those we want to enlist as allies in a common cause.”

— Sydney J. Harris

117. “All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.”

— Sydney J. Harris

118. “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

119. “Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.”

— Sydney J. Harris

120. “If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.”

— Sydney J. Harris

121. “The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.”

— Sydney J. Harris

122. “The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license 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

123. “Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder – and turn quickly to my typewriter.”

— Sydney J. Harris

124. “A truly successful person knows how to overcome the past, use the present, and prepare for the future-but unless we can first surmount the past, we cannot effectively cope with either the present or the future.”

— Sydney J. Harris

125. “Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady.”

— Sydney J. Harris

126. “Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in ‘getting things done’ is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.”

— Sydney J. Harris

127. “Just as communism always begins with an appeal to “humanity” and equality” and ends with inhuman despotism, so does fascism always begin with an appeal to “nationalism” and “individualism,” and ends with a military collectivism far worse than the disease it purports to cure.”

— Sydney J. Harris

128. “A good talker is sensitive to expression, to tone and color and inflection in human speech. Because he himself is articulate, he can help others to articulate their half-formulated feelings. His mind fills in the gaps, and he becomes, in Socrates’ words, a kind of midwife for ideas that are struggling to be born.”

— Sydney J. Harris

129. “It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.”

— Sydney J. Harris

130. “There is no such thing as an “atrocity” in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.”

— Sydney J. Harris

131. “The deepest and rarest kind of courage has nothing to do with feats or obstacles in the outside world; and, indeed, has nothing to do with the outside world – it is the courage to be who you are.”

— Sydney J. Harris

132. “As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood – and an almost total inability to practice it.”

— Sydney J. Harris

133. “Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.”

— Sydney J. Harris

134. “Just about the only interruption we don’t object to is applause.”

— Sydney J. Harris

135. “It’s odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are “morally offensive” so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry.”

— Sydney J. Harris

136. “We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.”

— Sydney J. Harris

137. “Filth is always a sign of weakness – in the mouth of the user and in the mind of the writer.”

— Sydney J. Harris

138. “The Unconvincibles are the people who are not amenable to reason of any sort. Their minds are not only closed, but bolted and hermetically sealed. In most cases, their beliefs congealed at an early age; by the time they left their teens, they were encased in a rigid framework of thought and feeling, which no evidence or argument can penetrate.”

— Sydney J. Harris

139. “More trouble is caused in this world by indiscreet answers than by indiscreet questions.”

— Sydney J. Harris

140. “Making out an invitation list for a party brings out the worst in everyone. It is then that our most ruthless estimates of the people we know come into play.”

— Sydney J. Harris

141. “It’s surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you’re not comfortable within yourself, you can’t be comfortable with others.”

— Sydney J. Harris

142. “All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.”

— Sydney J. Harris

143. “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

144. “Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.”

— Sydney J. Harris

145. “In a real sense, all of us are “the parents” of all young children – because we help shape the culture and determine its values.”

— Sydney J. Harris

146. “In most cases, it gives a false impression of my views – but when i am confronting an extremist, I become a passionate defender of the opposite view... This, of course, is a senseless way to behave; it is over-reacting to a situation. But, in all fairness, there is something about extremism that breeds its own opposite.”

— Sydney J. Harris