199 Quotes by Norman Cousins

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.

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling.

Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.

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.

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?

Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.

The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home.