We offer a new approach for determining Harnack quantities for the curve shortening flow and we show how, following this procedure, one can obtain Hamilton's Harnack inequality for this flow $\kappa_t+\frac{1}{2t}\kappa\geq\frac{\kappa_s^2}{\kappa}$, where $\kappa$ is the curvature of the curve being deformed by the flow.