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.
SYDNEY J. HARRISYou 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.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.
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Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder – and turn quickly to my typewriter.
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Never let your fears be the boundaries of your dreams. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
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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.
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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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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.
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People decline invitations when they are “indisposed” physically, and I wish they would do likewise when they feel indisposed emotionally. A person has no more right to attend a party with a head full of venom than with a throat full of virus.
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The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
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Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one’s own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you-either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.
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All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.
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We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.
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Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.
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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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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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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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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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Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
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The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.
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The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.
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The best combination of parents consists of a father who is gentle beneath his firmness, and a mother who is firm beneath her gentleness.
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A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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