Quote

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.

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
Fact
Facts
Jurisdiction
May
Command
Men
Supreme
Although
Meaning
Hold
Existence

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Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
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Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
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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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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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All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.
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The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him.
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We will not have peace by afterthought.
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Integration is a basic law of life when we resist it, disintegration is the natural result, both inside and outside of us. Thus we come to the concept of harmony through integration.
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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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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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The control center of your life is your attitude.
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The conquest of war and the pursuit of social justice... must become our grand preoccupation and magnificent obsession.
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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 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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War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
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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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Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions
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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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