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No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his philosophy of life until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies.

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
Life
Pay
Delivering
Philosophy
Lectures
Wife
Sermons
Enemy
Neighbors
Attention
Enemies
Friends
Neighbor
Lecture
Children
Treats
Sermon
Men
Exactly
Subordinates

More quotes by Sydney J. Harris

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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.
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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American parents, on the whole, do not want their sons to be artisans or craftsmen, but business or professional people. As a result, millions of youngsters are being prepared for careers they have little aptitude for - and little interest in except for dubious prestige.
Sydney J. Harris
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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
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We must become masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another person determine whether we will be rude or gracious, elated or depressed is to give control of ourselves. The only true possession is self possession.
Sydney J. Harris
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We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'
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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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
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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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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
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The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
Sydney J. Harris
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Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with credit cards.
Sydney J. Harris
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Men make counterfeit money in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
Sydney J. Harris
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An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
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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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
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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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Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the right answer more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.
Sydney J. Harris
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Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.
Sydney J. Harris
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Terrorism is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it war is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.
Sydney J. Harris