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The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.

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
Proportion
Instruments
Increase
Direct
Possibility
War
Effectiveness
Increases

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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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Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.
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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 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 control center of your life is your attitude.
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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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To be able to rise from the earth to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe
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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 capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.
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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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The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.
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For every low there is an equal but opposite high.
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My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
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Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations- plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.
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We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth.
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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 physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.
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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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We have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all — time to think and the habit of thought.
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A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.
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