Quotes from Norman Cousins

Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.

We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth.

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.

A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.

All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.

Free will and determinism are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism. The way you play your hand is free will.

Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.

The eternal quest of the human being is to shatter his loneliness.

War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.

We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought.

What was significant about the laughter . . . was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person . . .a form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.

A man can do something for peace without having to jump into politics. Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a man to listen to his own goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? This is the question that counts.

Time is the one thing that patients need most from their doctors--time to be heard, time to have things explained, time to reassured, time to be introduced by the doctor personally to specialists or other attendants whose very existence seems to reflect something new and threatening. yet the one thing that too many doctors find most difficult to command or manage is time.

Placebos," Dr. Shapiro has written in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, "can have profound effects on organic illness, including incurable malignancies.

But enough research has been done to indicate that those individuals with determination to overcome an illness tend to have a greater tolerance to severe pain than those who are morbidly apprehensive.

In extreme form, stress can cause symptoms of conversion hysteria—a malaise described by Jean Charcot, Freud's teacher.

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The real tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.