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

Sydney J. Harris

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Sydney J. Harris
Age: 69 †
Born: 1917
Born: September 14
Died: 1986
Died: December 8
Journalist
London
England
Sydney Harris
Asking
Ought
Democracy
System
Persists
Whether
Persist
Political
Voting
Witty
Powers

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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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Those obsessed with health are not healthy the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.
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God cannot be solemn, or he would not have blessed man with the incalculable gift of laughter.
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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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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. Harris
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Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
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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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Many people know how to work hard many others know how to play well but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure.
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By the time a man asks you for advice, he has generally made up his mind what he wants to do, and is looking for confirmation rather than counseling.
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All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.
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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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We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.
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The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
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Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.
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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.
Sydney J. Harris
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Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.
Sydney J. Harris
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The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
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Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.
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Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
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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'.
Sydney J. Harris