Sydney J. Harris quotes:

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

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.

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.

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.

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.

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.

Why are we willing to accept a new mathematical formula we don't understand as the product of a brilliant mind, while rejecting a new art form we don't understand as the product of a deranged mind?

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.

When we have 'second thoughts' about something, our first thoughts don't seem like thoughts at all - just feelings.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'

Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.

The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.

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.

Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love -- takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault.

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.

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.

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.

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.

The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.

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.

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.

This is a lesson mankind has not yet learned. We identify, and stratify, and treat persons largely on the basis of their accidental (physical) characteristics, which have no deeper meaning.

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.

Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'

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

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

We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.

The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

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'.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

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 person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not.

If you want to know what a man's character is really like... ask him to tell you the living person he most admires - for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature.

History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.

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.

What the ordinary person means by a 'miracle' is some gross distortion or suspension of the laws of nature... but life itself strikes him as commonplace, when in truth a blade of grass or a neuron in the brain is a greater miracle...

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, but the perpetual human predicament is that the answer soon poses its own problems.

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.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

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.

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.

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.

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.

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.

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.

But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.

When we have "second thoughts" about something, our first thoughts don't seem like thoughts at all - just feelings.

Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.

When I hear somebody say 'Life is hard', I am always tempted to ask 'Compared to what?'

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.

"Terrorism" is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; "war" is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, his is also one who is permanently disappointed in the future.

A famously wise old man in a village was once asked how he came by his wisdom. "I got it from my good judgment," he answered. And where did his good judgment come from? "I got it from my bad judgment."

A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.

A 'penchant for telling the truth' can cripple a candidates chances faster than being caught in flagrante delicto with the governor's wife.

A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person.

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.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.

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.

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.

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

American parents, on the whole, do not want their sons to be artisans or craftsmen, but business or professional people. As a result, millions of youngsters are being prepared for careers they have little aptitude for - and little interest in except for dubious prestige.

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

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

As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it.

As we grow older, we should learn that these are two quite different things. Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters. We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable.

Being yourself is not remaining where you are, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure.

Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.

Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.

Christianity is not a "spiritual" religion, like some religions of the east. It is an intensely "practical" religion, having its moral roots in the practicality of judaism. It was not designed to change the way men think or believe as much as to change the way they act.

Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable - they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims.

Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.

Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder - and turn quickly to my typewriter.

Every rule in the book can be broken, except one - be who you are, and become all you were meant to be....

Filth is always a sign of weakness - in the mouth of the user and in the mind of the writer.

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

Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour. Happiness is a direction, not a place.

Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.

If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, "You Only Live Once."

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

Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.

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.

It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.

It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case." --

Just about the only interruption we don't object to is applause.

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

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

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.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.

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.

Many people know how to work hard; many others know how to play well; but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure.

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.