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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.

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
Great
Instructed
People
Governments
Truths
Perceive
Large
Built
Small
Specialize
Government
Intermediate

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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.
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I've learned that next to the atomic bomb, the greatest danger is defeatism, despair, and inadequate awareness of what human beings possess. I feel that any problem that can be defined is capable of being resolved. Out of this has come my conviction that no person knows enough to be a pessimist.
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He who keeps his cool best wins.
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Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity.
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Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.
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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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Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
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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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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.
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It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world.
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Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
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The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us
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Death is not the enemy living in constant fear of it is.
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If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first.
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Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life. It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate universe of individual life. It is the supreme awareness of awareness itself.
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Cynicism is intellectual treason.
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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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The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force in not independent of the belief system. Everything begins with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all.
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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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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.
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