Dorothy Thompson Quotes

No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument - the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.

The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear, a disastrous circle.

Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.

Hate smolders and eventually destroys, not the hated but the hater.

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live in every experience, painful or joyous, to live in gratitude for every moment, to live abundantly.

Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

If you think there's a bogeyman - turn on the light.

To have felt too much is to end in feeling nothing.

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings...Fear [False Evidence Appearing Real] grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Passitivity and quietism are invitations to war.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men?

Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.

The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.

The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

After the earthquake and the fire comes the still, small voice.

The United States is not a nation of people which in the long run allows itself to be pushed around.

Lawlessness is a self-perpetuating, ever-expanding habit.