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

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

Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
Norman Cousins

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.
Norman Cousins

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
Norman Cousins

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.
Norman Cousins

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
Norman Cousins

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.
Norman Cousins

The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force.
Norman Cousins

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
Norman Cousins

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.
Norman Cousins

We will not have peace by afterthought.
Norman Cousins

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.
Norman Cousins

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?
Norman Cousins

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
Norman Cousins

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