Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, his is also one who is permanently disappointed in the future.
Sydney J. Harris
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Sydney J. Harris
Age: 69 †
Born: 1917
Born: September 14
Died: 1986
Died: December 8
Journalist
London
England
Sydney Harris
Future
Fear
Cynic
Past
Permanently
Also
Reads
Disappointed
Bitter
Merely
Lessons
More quotes by Sydney J. Harris
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
A famously wise old man in a village was once asked how he came by his wisdom. I got it from my good judgment, he answered. And where did his good judgment come from? I got it from my bad judgment.
Sydney J. Harris
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.
Sydney J. Harris
As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it.
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.
Sydney J. Harris
The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.
Sydney J. Harris
This is a lesson mankind has not yet learned. We identify, and stratify, and treat persons largely on the basis of their accidental (physical) characteristics, which have no deeper meaning.
Sydney J. Harris
There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.
Sydney J. Harris
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
Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.
Sydney J. Harris
Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
Sydney J. Harris
There is no such thing as an atrocity in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
Sydney J. Harris
If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, You Only Live Once.
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
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
We truly possess only what we are able to renounce otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.
Sydney J. Harris
Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. 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.
Sydney J. Harris
Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
Sydney J. Harris
Why do so many people yearn for an eternal life when they don't even know what to do with themselves in this brief one?
Sydney J. Harris
Skepticism is not an end in itself it is a tool for the discovery of truths.
Sydney J. Harris
