Dorothy Thompson quotes

Dorothy Thompson was an influential American journalist and radio broadcaster, often called the "First Lady of American Journalism." Her reporting and commentary made a significant impact on public opinion in the United States during the early to mid-20th century. She became especially well known for her outspoken criticism of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Here are 84 of her quotes:

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

Dorothy Thompson

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

Dorothy Thompson

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.

Dorothy Thompson

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.

Dorothy Thompson

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.

Dorothy Thompson

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.

Dorothy Thompson

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

Dorothy Thompson

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

Dorothy Thompson

The instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.

Dorothy Thompson

The prices are ridiculous... I don't see how people can go back and forth to work or to school. How can we afford the gas?

Dorothy Thompson

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

Dorothy Thompson

Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

Dorothy Thompson

The Vatican newspaper in Rome, Osservatore Romano, said of National Socialism, ‘It is the most inhumane of all heresies. Hitler is true to his role of anti-Christ.

Dorothy Thompson

Anti-semitism became equal to anti-Republicanism. And Hitler went to the peasants with a campaign of anti-capitalism.

Dorothy Thompson

This kind of thinking is taking a long view, in which one must also count the imponderables, such as the effort of prolonged depression upon restless social forces; the inevitable necessity for National Socialism to move very far to the Left, the possible revolt of the people everywhere against dawdling tactics of their leaders.

Dorothy Thompson

Private shops [in Soviet Russia]... are taxed higher than co-operatives, are granted less favorable concessions, and enjoy a grudging legality. Nevertheless, their owners often make a great deal of money. The only explanation for it is the shortage of goods and the hunger for them. When one asks for the explanation of such a phenomenon in an agricultural country one is told: The government is exporting grain, the milk or egg price is too low and the peasants are holding back.

Dorothy Thompson

The education of the Nazi elite, it turns out, is the education of super-racketeers and gangsters from among the biologically superior. The concept of ‘noblesse oblige' is transformed into its polar opposite;...

Dorothy Thompson

For already the myth is being carefully built up. Hitler is to be the Messiah of organic evolution-the anti-Christ of the will to power, which is not a will to national power but a will to power per se, the liberation of the lustfully destructive from any inhibitions whatsoever.

Dorothy Thompson

And now the beginning of the expropriation of church lands in Austria, have all revealed the true face of National Socialism, which more and more among pious Germans is called, under their breaths, ‘the brown Bolshevism.

Dorothy Thompson

No citizen should be permitted to become a member of or contribute to any organization whose members are pledged, or have ever been pledged, to tender prior loyalty to any state other than the United States, or to defend any state other than the United States in case of war, except as in such a war the United States might formally be allied with another power.

Dorothy Thompson

Communist parties are both legal and illegal, and the illegal structure governs the legal. But legality is an enormous aid to the illegal conspiracy. It prevents forthright action against the chief criminals; it leads to roundabout persecution; it enables the Communist to deceive simple, generous-hearted, and gullible citizens, and it leads to dubiously legal actions from the government itself. The present half-legal, half-persecuted position of the Party and its members is not justice. It operates to eliminate one evil with another, both evils containing dangers to the Constitutional order.

Dorothy Thompson

A continually reaffirmed thesis of communism is that its objectives cannot be realized without ruthless violence nor within the framework of a constitutional order.

Dorothy Thompson