Question about duplicate content

I want to start a reviews roundup page. I don't want to actually review the products, but provide a reviews roundup. Perhaps a paragraph or two from the original review, with a link to the source.

Will this harm my website, in any way?

If you take a paragraph or two from something as short as a review you will probably be violating copyright.

A few of my clients have done that in the past, but they never pulled any text from the actual reviews. They sort of combined some 5 or 6 reviews from industry leaders and wrote up a gist of what everyone was saying. This doesn't have to be very laborious; you can put it like
It took me like a minute to type that up. It's pretty easy plus you can avoid duplicate content filters and save yourself from falling out of favor with the original reviewers. It also helps to have more content on your pages and not rely on these "roundups" to fluff your site up.

EDIT: As EGOL points out, that's another important issue you need to take into consideration. Be careful never to violate copyright laws.

In the mobile blogging world, people are always quoting one another and linking back to the sources of the review, news story or whatever. I didn't think that would violate copyright laws, as long as we referred to the source. hmmm

Most reviews are about 5 pages long

Well, there's two ways to "quote" someone: either you "quote" or you "plagiarize." It's very difficult to draw a perfect line between these two. If people are doing it all the time, then it's probably safe to do but if I were you, I'd go the safer route and just create fresh content.

Ahh contrar... I find no trouble drawing the line.
And yes quoting a synopsis(or a small snippet from the beginning) of an article while providing reference to the original work is accepted.
I have never had a problem...

Visio, that's my feelings on this matter too.

I guess I'm just concerned about the dupe content, I guess doing a roundup in my own words is a good alternative, just perhaps more time consuming.

The reason I'm trying to cut time, is because it's already going to take me several months to do.

I'm basically creating pages about particular pieces of hardware, a small part of these pages is going to be the reviews from other reviewers. I'm not a reviewer and have no interest in being one. The rest of the page will be filled up with other content related to the piece of hardware.