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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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You are younger today than you will ever be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow.
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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 capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.
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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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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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Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
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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 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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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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The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need.
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Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.
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For every low there is an equal but opposite high.
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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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Don't defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
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My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
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Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.
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War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
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What was significant about the laughter . . . was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person . . . form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.
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Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life
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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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