"A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.""A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.""A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.""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.""Cynicism is intellectual treason.""Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.""He who keeps his cool best wins.""Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.""History is a vast early warning system.""Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.""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.""It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.""It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.""Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.""Laughter is inner jogging.""Life is an adventure in forgiveness.""Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.""My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.""Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.""People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.""Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.""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.""The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.""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.""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.""The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.""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.""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.""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.""We will not have peace by afterthought.""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.""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?""Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.""Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going."
Cousins was born in Union City, New Jersey. At age 11, he was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis and placed in a sanatorium. Despite this, he was an athletic youth, and he claimed that as a young boy, he had “set out to discover exuberance.”
Cousins attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, New York City, graduating on February 3, 1933. He edited the high school paper, "The Square Deal", where his editing abilities were already in evidence. Cousins received a bachelor’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City.
He joined the staff of the New York Evening Post (now the New York Post) in 1934, and in 1935 he was hired by Current History as a book critic. He later ascended to the position of managing editor. He also befriended the staff of the Saturday Review of Literature (later renamed Saturday Review), which had its offices in the same building, and later joined the staff of that publication as well by 1940. He was named editor-in-chief in 1942, a position he would hold until 1972. Under his direction, circulation of the publication increased from 20,000 to 650,000.
Cousins's philosophy toward his work was exemplified by his instructions to his staff “not just to appraise literature, but to try to serve it, nurture it, safeguard it.” Cousins believed that “there is a need for writers who can restore to writing its powerful tradition of leadership in crisis.”
Politically, Cousins was a tireless advocate of liberal causes, such as nuclear disarmament and world peace, which he promoted through his writings in Saturday Review. In a 1984 forum at the University of California, Berkeley entitled “Quest for Peace,” Cousins recalled the long editorial he wrote on August 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Titled “The Modern Man is Obsolete,” Cousins, who stated that he felt “the deepest guilt” over the bomb’s use on human beings, discussed in the editorial the social and political implications of the atomic bomb and nuclear power. He rushed to get it published the next day in the Review, and the response was considerable, as it was reprinted in newspapers around the country, and enlarged into a book that was reprinted in different languages.
In the 1950s, Cousins played a prominent role in the bringing the Hiroshima Maidens, a group of twenty-five Hibakusha, to the United States for medical treatment.
In the 1960s, he began the American-Soviet Dartmouth Conferences for peace process.
Cousins also wrote a collection of non-fiction books on the same subjects, such as the 1953 Who Speaks for Man? , which advocated a World Federation and nuclear disarmament. He also served as president of the World Federalist Association and chairman of the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy, which in the 1950s, warned that the world was bound for a nuclear holocaust if the threat of the nuclear arms race was not stopped. Cousins became an unofficial ambassador in the 1960s, and his facilitating communication between the Holy See, the Kremlin and the White House helped lead to the Soviet-American test ban treaty, for which he was thanked by President John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, the latter of which awarded him his personal medallion. Cousins was also awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Peace Award in 1963, the Family Man of the Year Award in 1968, the United Nations Peace Medal in 1971, and the Niwano Peace Prize in 1990. His proudest moment by his own reckoning, however, was when Albert Einstein called him to Princeton University to discuss issues of nuclear disarmament and world federalism.
Cousins also served as Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities for the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he did research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he long believed were the key to human beings’ success in fighting illness. It was a belief he maintained even as he battled heart disease, which he fought both by taking massive doses of Vitamin C and, according to him, by training himself to laugh. He wrote a collection of best-selling non-fiction books on illness and healing, as well as a 1980 autobiographical memoir, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook. Late in life Cousins was diagnosed with a form of arthritis then called Marie-Strumpell's disease (ankylosing spondylitis), although this diagnosis is currently in doubt and it has been suggested that Cousins may actually have had reactive arthritis. His struggle with this illness is detailed in the book and movie Anatomy of an Illness.
Told that he had little chance of surviving. Cousins developed a recovery program incorporating megadoses of Vitamin C, along with a positive attitude, love, faith, hope, and laughter induced by Marx Brothers films. "I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep," he reported. "When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval."
Cousins received the Albert Schweitzer Prize in 1990. He died of heart failure on November 30, 1990, in Los Angeles, California, having survived years longer than his doctors predicted: 10 years after his first heart attack, 26 years after his collagen illness, and 36 years after his doctors first diagnosed his heart disease.
He and his wife Ellen raised four daughters: Andrea, Amy, Candis, and Sarah Kitt. He is buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
An obituary containing further information, mainly of his editing career, was published by the New York Times in the December 2, 1990 edition.