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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
Seek
Better
People
Forebears
Genealogy
Perverse
Preoccupation
Demonstrate

More quotes by Sydney J. Harris

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It may be true that the weak will always be driven to the wall but it is the task of a just society to see that the wall is climbable.
Sydney J. Harris
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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
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A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, his is also one who is permanently disappointed in the future.
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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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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
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We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.
Sydney J. Harris
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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
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God cannot be solemn, or he would not have blessed man with the incalculable gift of laughter.
Sydney J. Harris
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Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realists.
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Character is something you forge for yourself temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.
Sydney J. Harris
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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?
Sydney J. Harris
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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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If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
Sydney J. Harris
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The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
Sydney J. Harris
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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
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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
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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.
Sydney J. Harris
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Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?
Sydney J. Harris
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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.
Sydney J. Harris
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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