Quotes by Sydney J. Harris

“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 f...”

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”

“At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teachit is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.”

“What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing...”

“And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respe...”

“And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the o...”

“I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as "symbols" of family life. What they want are ideal children, not...”

“Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishin...”

“But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, often frighten off the average person from the free development of this appetite.”

“But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.”

“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 rel...”

“The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractionsthose "communists" this time, t...”

“A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he ...”

“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.”

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”

“The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.”

“Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for youeither by the Establishment, ...”

“Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainerfor unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.”

“When a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he meansfor there can be no knowledge without words; there can only be feelings.”

“All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be hap...”