Sydney J. Harris Quotes

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

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

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

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

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

Happiness is a direction, not a place.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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'.