Sydney J. Harris

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

“If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?”

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

“The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.”

“The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.”

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

“The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.”

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

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