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

More from Sydney J. Harris

• Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.
• It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
• The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
• The 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."
• 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 you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.