Norman Cousins quotes - page 5

Do you prefer that you be right or happy? (Norman Cousins)
Belief creates biology. View quote
Norman Cousins
To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. View quote
Norman Cousins
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. View quote
Norman Cousins
No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing. View quote
Norman Cousins
The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession. View quote
Norman Cousins
Although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him. View quote
Norman Cousins
More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens. View quote
Norman Cousins
It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world. View quote
Norman Cousins
The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system. View quote
Norman Cousins
Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding. (Norman Cousins)
The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose. View quote
Norman Cousins
Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country. View quote
Norman Cousins
The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home. View quote
Norman Cousins
The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind. View quote
Norman Cousins
The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community. View quote
Norman Cousins
The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment. View quote
Norman Cousins
History is an accumulation of error. View quote
Norman Cousins
Integration is a basic law of life; when we resist it, disintegration is the natural result, both inside and outside of us. Thus we come to the concept of harmony through integration. View quote
Norman Cousins
The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society. View quote
Norman Cousins
Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. (Norman Cousins)
Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity. View quote
Norman Cousins
Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties. View quote
Norman Cousins
Pessimism operates in a narrowed field of vision that fails to take into account the possibilities at the outer edges of experience. View quote
Norman Cousins
Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life. View quote
Norman Cousins