01c. 1951 ADThe 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.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
02c. 1951 ADThe whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
03c. 1951 ADAt it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it 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.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
04c. 1951 ADWhat 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 those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
05c. 1951 ADAnd 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 respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
06c. 1951 ADAnd 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1951 ADI 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 / quote ↗
08c. 1951 ADGenuine 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; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
09c. 1951 ADA 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 knows.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
10c. 1951 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1951 ADBut 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.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
12c. 1951 ADBut 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.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
13c. 1951 ADAncient 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1951 ADThe 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 abstractions—those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time. But those we are fighting and killing are people—men, women and children—not political, geographic or economic abstractions. They are, in the main, as decent and fearful and confused as we are. And they regard us as abstractions as much as we do them.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
15c. 1951 ADThe 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.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
16c. 1951 ADLife 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 you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
17c. 1951 ADWhen a man says "I know what I mean, but I can't express it," he generally does not know what he means—for there can be no knowledge without words; there can only be feelings.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
18c. 1951 ADThe real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
19c. 1951 ADMuch as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
20c. 1951 ADAll 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 happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he is in a hopeless bind. His goals have been set for him by his milieu, and he cannot be his own man; so he simply refuses to play the game. He "does not try.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
21c. 1951 ADThe difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
22c. 1951 ADThe lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere it is not this sort of licence that distinguishes New York. It is rather a lust of the total ego for recognition even for eminence. More than elsewhere everybody here wants to be Somebody.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
23c. 1951 ADMany persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.Sydney J. Harris / quote ↗
24c. 1951 ADWe 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 / quote ↗
