Politics & Power Quote by Norman Cousins

Cousins builds a tidy moral trap: you can’t cheer the United Nations from the cheap seats. The line works because it turns institutional survival into a test of personal integrity, assigning escalating obligations to three kinds of supporters. “Represent” implies diplomats and member states; “advocate” points to public intellectuals, NGOs, and domestic politicians; “believe” targets the broader citizenry. Each group gets a verb that bites a little harder: bolster, submit, fight. The progression strips away the comfortable middle ground where people praise multilateralism while treating it as optional.

The subtext is impatience with performative internationalism. “Bolster it” isn’t rhetorical support; it’s funding, staffing, and political cover when UN action becomes unpopular at home. “Submit to it” is the daring phrase, because it demands that even supporters accept constraint: rules, inspections, resolutions, and the humiliation of being told “no” by a body you like only when it agrees with you. Cousins is diagnosing the UN’s chronic dilemma: it’s asked to deliver peace without being granted enforcement, legitimacy without sovereignty, authority without sacrifice.

Context matters: a mid-20th-century author shaped by world war and early Cold War tension, writing in an era when the UN was alternately idealized as humanity’s conscience and dismissed as a talking shop. The quote’s hard edge pushes against that sentimental haze. Cousins isn’t romanticizing global governance; he’s warning that institutions don’t survive on hope. They survive when their supposed friends accept costs, limits, and conflict on their behalf.