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I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.

Norman Cousins

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Norman Cousins
Age: 75 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 24
Died: 1990
Died: November 30
Journalist
Literary Critic
Peace Activist
Professor
Writer
Union City
New Jersey
Liberty
Opposites
Belief
Hungry
Stranded
Cannot
Depth
Affirm
Human
Fail
Incomplete
Humans
Harmony
Texture
Without
Therefore
Fulfillment
Many
Failing
Unity
Men
Color
Diversity

More quotes by Norman Cousins

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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.
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The great challenge of the '90s... is to salvage and improve the UN and to develop it into an agency capable of meeting the wide range of serious problems that are inherent in a world that has become a single geographic unit.
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Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?
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The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.
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History is a vast early warning system.
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To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.
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More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.
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Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.
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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.
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A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.
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Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?
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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 into it.
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It is well known that panic, despair, depression, hate, rage, exasperation, frustration all produce negative biochemical changes in the body.
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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.
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The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness . . . Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition.
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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 one 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.
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Laughter serves as a blocking agent. Like a bullet-proof vest, it may help protect you against the ravages of negative emotions that can assault you in disease.
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Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
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Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
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We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.
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