Norman Cousins Quotes

I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.

Why is it so important for you to give back? I honestly feel like it's our responsibility as citizens of the world to ground ourselves in selflessness and all do our part.

We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.

I love school and science; I also love piano and music.

I was born in France, but I would have been happy to have been born in Senegal or in Romania or Japan. I don't care. This planet is both so small and so big, but I'm part of it.

We can't afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.

I think progressives understand that we are Americans at the same time as we are global citizens. We are interested first and foremost in creating peace and prosperity here at home, but we aren't blind to the fact that injustice anywhere in the world is meaningful, important, and worth thinking about.

Every day I walk down the street or hop on the subway, I am reminded that I am a citizen of a very big, incredibly diverse world.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

The world itself is already a great textbook.

Planet Earth is estimated to have a lifetime of nine billion years. And we're right smack in the middle of our lifetime. We've been in the universe for 4.5 billion years. So, that should mean something. We should sort of take a look at where we came from and where we are going.

I learn about history and religion and politics. It keeps me tuned in. If I hear something on the news, I'm like, 'Oh my God, this is what somebody is talking about in the play that I'm about to do in two hours.' The act itself - of rehearsing, failing, and still persisting and trying to create - keeps me curious, keeps me searching.

I don't know why I developed a social consciousness, but I really think I have a consciousness; I feel connected to everything and everybody in the world.

On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!

Through art, mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men. They are the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them.

I'm not trying to amass people in the streets. I just want them to be more aware. So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself. And so anything from the travel stories I tell, that's what I'm trying to get across.

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.

I am trying to teach my children to feel a responsibility for their fellow human beings and a sense of connection with ... the world around them.

The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity.

And I didn't know what that meant for a long time. It was only when I began to travel and look and live beyond my home that I understand my responsibility to others.

There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

The relationships of our present social life are so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position could not readily share in many of the most important of them. Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome.

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.

Those who would know the world, seek first within your beings' depths; those who would truly know themselves, develop interest in the world.