The Best of Sydney J. Harris Quotes

“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 omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“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, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“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 real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“Somebody once said that if many people had not read about romantic love and seen it on the screen, they would never look for it themselves. I believe this. And along with it I believe that if many people were not ashamed to be thought deficient in "family feeling" they would never have children.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“As Bernard Shaw said, “He who can, does: he who cannot, teaches.” But, as Sydney J. Harris put it, “Let’s revise Shaw’s foolish saying to ‘He who can, does; he who understands, teaches.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris