Sydney J. Harris

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."

The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

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

Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is the one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we stop saying "It got lost," and say "I lost it."

When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil," it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.