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.
SYDNEY J. HARRISAgnosticism 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.
More Sydney J. Harris Quotes
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Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.
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Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’
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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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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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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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We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
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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 ‘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