Quote

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.

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
Natural
Heal
Force
Begins
Body
Drive
Human
Independent
Everything
System
Humans
Greatest
Believe
Belief
Heartache
Powerful
Option

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In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
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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.
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A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.
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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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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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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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Pessimism is a waste of time.
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Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
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Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
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Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions
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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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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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Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.
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War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
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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 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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The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope
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History is a vast early warning system.
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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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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.
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