Norman Cousins (1915 – 1990)
Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of California and a prominent world federalist leader.
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.
Cynicism is intellectual treason.
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.
We will not have peace by afterthought.
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live.
Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Hope, faith, love and a strong will to live offer no promise of immortality, only proof of our uniqueness ans human beings and the opportunity to experience full growth even under the grimmest circumstances. Far more real than the ticking of time is the way we open up the minutes and invest them with meaning. Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth.
A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.
Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour.
What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.
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.
The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
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.
Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
History is a vast early warning system.
The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.
Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns.