Sydney J. Harris Men Quotations

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.

The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

All significant achievement comes from daring from experiment from the willingness to risk failure.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

A famously wise old man in a village was once asked how he came by his wisdom. "I got it from my good judgment," he answered. And where did his good judgment come from? "I got it from my bad judgment."

By the time a man asks you for advice, he has generally made up his mind what he wants to do, and is looking for confirmation rather than counseling.

As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.

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.

God cannot be solemn, or he would not have blessed man with the incalculable gift of laughter.

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.

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.

Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.

Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.

Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

Christianity is not a "spiritual" religion, like some religions of the east. It is an intensely "practical" religion, having its moral roots in the practicality of judaism. It was not designed to change the way men think or believe as much as to change the way they act.

Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

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'.

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