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. HARRISMen make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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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.
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We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.’
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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.
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The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.
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Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.
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Every rule in the book can be broken, except one – be who you are, and become all you were meant to be.
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The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
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When we have “second thoughts” about something, our first thoughts don’t seem like thoughts at all – just feelings.
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Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.
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Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
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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.
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You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.
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Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.
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Man’s unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
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Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
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The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.
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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.
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The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.
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If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
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There is no such thing as an “atrocity” in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
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The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.
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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.
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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.
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A loser says that’s the way it’s always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
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Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, ‘Why not?’ and the other, ‘Why bother?’
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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