The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read.

The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.

We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness . . . Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition.

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.

Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.