Sydney J. Harris

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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'.

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