Norman Cousins Quotes

Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live.

Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns.

Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.

History is a vast early warning system.

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

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.

Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.

What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.

[The recovery] began, I said, when I decided that some experts don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being. And I said I hoped they would be careful about what they said to others; they might be believed and that could be the beginning of the end.

If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.

Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour..

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.

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

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.