Sydney J. Harris

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.

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.

When we have 'second thoughts' about something, our first thoughts don't seem like thoughts at all - just feelings.

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?

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.

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'.

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.

Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.