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.

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 physician knows that his little black bag can carry him only so far and that the body's own healing system is the main resource.

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.

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.

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

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.