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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
Whether
Persist
Political
Voting
Witty
Powers
Asking
Ought
Democracy
System
Persists
More quotes by Sydney J. Harris
Those obsessed with health are not healthy the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.
Sydney J. Harris
If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.
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Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a necessary evil, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
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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.
Sydney J. Harris
Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
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Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.
Sydney J. Harris
There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.
Sydney J. Harris
Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
Sydney J. Harris
The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.
Sydney J. Harris
If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
Sydney J. Harris
Never let your fears be the boundaries of your dreams. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
Sydney J. Harris
All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.
Sydney J. Harris
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.
Sydney J. Harris
The real heretic is not the atheist or agnostic (who are often decent people) but those who murmur it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it makes you feel good. This turns religion into a subjective matter, like taste in furnishings, and robs theology of its claim to ultimate truth.
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There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.
Sydney J. Harris
The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.
Sydney J. Harris
As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.
Sydney J. Harris
Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.
Sydney J. Harris
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Sydney J. Harris
If you want to know what a man's character is really like... ask him to tell you the living person he most admires - for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature.
Sydney J. Harris
