Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney J. Harris

In a culture that treats “content” as a virtue in itself, Sydney J. Harris draws a clean, almost surgical line: information is output; communication is impact. The first flatters the sender. The second holds the sender accountable. That’s the sting in his phrasing. “Giving out” sounds easy, even casual, like distributing flyers. “Getting through” implies resistance: noise, boredom, prejudice, bad faith, competing incentives. It admits the audience is not an empty hard drive waiting to be filled but a terrain you have to cross.

Harris wrote as a mid-century journalist, when mass media was learning to sell the idea that more channels meant more understanding. His distinction punctures that optimism. It also anticipates a modern pathology: institutions that confuse publishing with persuading, and leaders who mistake press releases, dashboards, and “transparency” for trust. Information can be technically correct and still socially useless. Communication requires empathy, narrative, timing, and the humility to discover what the other person actually heard.

The subtext is a rebuke to professional talkers - columnists included. Harris is reminding his own industry that a fact delivered without context, without relevance, without a receiver’s frame of reference, is just data litter. “Getting through” is not manipulation; it’s the hard work of making meaning land. In an era of endless broadcasting, he’s arguing for fewer megaphones and more measured, listener-shaped sentences.