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Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
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
Better
People
Forebears
Genealogy
Perverse
Preoccupation
Demonstrate
Seek
More quotes by Sydney J. Harris
Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
Sydney J. Harris
Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.
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 a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
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
We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
Sydney J. Harris
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
Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.
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
Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.
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
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
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.
Sydney J. Harris
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris
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.
Sydney J. Harris
Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady.
Sydney J. Harris
As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress.
Sydney J. Harris
The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
Sydney J. Harris
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.
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
