Norman Cousins Quotes

"It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete."

"The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose."

"All things are possible once enough human beings realize that the whole of the human future is at stake"

"History is a vast early warning system."

"The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth."

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

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

"The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started."

"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."

"Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man."

"Laughter is inner jogging."

"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."

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

"What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth."

"If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it."

"The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts in it. Anyone who can read, can learn to read deeply and thus live more fully."

"Cynicism is intellectual treason."

"People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time"

"Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations."

"Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep"