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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.

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
Conscience
Necessary
Less
Evil
Assuage
Look
Ethics
Looks
Begins
Something
Integrity
Calling

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Character is something you forge for yourself temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.
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We truly possess only what we are able to renounce otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.
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Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.
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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.
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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?
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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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Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
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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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It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.
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Many people feel guilty about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.
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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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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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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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Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
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Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.
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Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
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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.
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Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.
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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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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.
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