Dorothy Thompson quotes - page 2

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:

Thus, the Communists program for agriculture, universal for all countries, would expropriate entirely all farmers living above subsistence or its margin, who are eventually to be collectivized.

Dorothy Thompson

The publicly propagandized aims of communism are vaguely liberal. One can read the Daily Worker every day for a year without finding any clear exegesis of Communist principle. Like Hitler, Communists, outside their own ranks, promise all things to most men, denouncing only ‘monopolists' ‘imperialists' (and failing to provide a glossary for their meaning of these terms), opposing race discrimination, child labor, etc.

Dorothy Thompson

To say that it ‘unconstitutional' to outlaw and prosecute such a movement is merely to admit that democracies can devise no legal means to protect themselves.

Dorothy Thompson

[The Communist's] objective is not to secure ‘agreements' or ‘compromises,' but to use the tribunes of governments for disruptive agitation, and destroy the representative system from within... Any Communist, sitting in any ‘bourgeoisie' government, represents only the Communist International.

Dorothy Thompson

All Communists speak of the Soviet Union as their ‘Fatherland.' At this seventh Congress, Marcel Cachin, one of the French delegates, said, ‘Comrades, all the parties of the Communist International have never been more attached than at the present time to their Fatherland, the Soviet Union.'

Dorothy Thompson

The American Communist Party is not an autonomous body. Its members, who claim their rights under the American Constitution have already relinquished every personal right to an international, actually Russian, body. Their claim to participate in the political life of America is as preposterous as would be the claim of the Jugoslav Communist Party to participate, because the American, Russian, Jugoslav, Bulgarian, etc., parties are all the same organization.

Dorothy Thompson

The idea of the State being a sort of apotheosis of the People, their ultimate expression and good, was invented for the modern age by the German philosopher, Hegel, and both Karl Marx, the father of Communism, and Mussolini, the inventor of Fascism,...

Dorothy Thompson

The hotels are entirely run by the Moscow Soviet, which seems to have picked its employees rather for their political reliability than for their experience or cleverness at hotel management.

Dorothy Thompson

Indeed, gaiety is singularly lacking everywhere in Russia. What is intense and joyful goes into pioneer work and not into amusement. Only in the company of young communists and artists can one find stimulation.

Dorothy Thompson

A Frenchman who is in close touch with the situation at home told me this week, ‘We would have Fascism in France already if Germany and Italy had not done it first.

Dorothy Thompson

The contribution of Communism to the nihilism of democratic despair has been to shear humanism off democracy, to reduce the concept of democracy to crass materialism, to interpret life in terms of bread alone. The Nazis, as anti-humanistic as the Communists, have elevated the Communist Have-Not doctrine into a war cry for the Have-Not states.

Dorothy Thompson

For it is no longer possible to regard Fascism as the friend of Christianity. And in making a cultural treaty with Hitler, Franco has laid Spain wide open to the penetration of Nazi ideology, which has been repeatedly denounced by the Pope himself as anti-Christian.

Dorothy Thompson

The fathers of American Democracy had no exaggerated respect for the State, because they were pre-eminently men of reason and common sense. They never, for instance, identified the State with the People. They knew that the State is, by very definition, an instrument of oppression and coercion, and their idea was to make it strong enough to keep order and ward off enemies, and limit it otherwise very strictly.

Dorothy Thompson

Someday, when women realize that the object of their emancipation is not to make them more like men, but more powerfully womanly, and therefore of greater use to men and themselves and society...

Dorothy Thompson

It is intolerable that a whole race should be indicted and banned- each individual, good, bad and indifferent, lumped into one category-as the Jews are in Germany. It is intolerable that we should accept the principle that there is a permanent, irreconcilable and even necessary hostility between workers and the men who employ them-as is positively implied in this country, in the National Labor Relations Act.

Dorothy Thompson

[T]he object of mankind is not to live in a perfectly functioning universe, but to live in a tolerable universe, which means one suited to the nature and aspirations of human beings.

Dorothy Thompson

The Liberal is distinguished from the Conservative and the Radical, not only by his basic philosophy but by his methods. Never does he believe that a good end justifies and evil means. He seeks to find everything that binds men together, rather than what divides them, for he loves persuasion and detests coercion.

Dorothy Thompson

A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality-that of his masters.

Dorothy Thompson

Radicals and Conservatives are not at all unlike, temperamentally. They want order, organization, efficiency, perfection. The Conservative or Reactionary thinks these can be best obtained by putting and keeping the power in the hands of a small class. He is afraid that an extension of democracy will destroy form and tradition, which he believes are essential to holding any society together. The Radical is so obsessed by the obvious faults of society that he wants to pull everything up by the roots and start all over again, and build a perfect society according to a blueprint. It is interesting that when the extreme Radicals triumph-in a revolution, for instance, as in Russia-they immediately become rigidly conservative, and punish all deviation rigorously. The worst fundamentalists in the world today are the Russian communists.

Dorothy Thompson

Liberalism is not being killed by dictators. Liberalism is committing suicide-out of despair and a bad conscience. What liberalism needs is a revival, in the evangelical sense of the word. It needs to admit its sins, as the basis of renewing its life.

Dorothy Thompson

The easiest way to simplify society is to reduce it to a military organization. That is the most primitive form of social organization. And that is precisely what is being done. The unit of communal life shrinks. Wealth, prosperity, inventiveness, choice, demand are subordinated to simplified nationalistic aims. The very mind which created the liberal universe becomes atrophied through disuse.

Dorothy Thompson

The rise of liberalism was accompanied by immense technological progress; by the industrial revolution; by the division of labor which ensued, and which suddenly, and prodigiously, accelerated the efficiency of production; and by the conception of economic life governed by the market. In other words, of economic life governed by the buyer, not the seller. This was a brand-new and wholly revolutionary idea.

Dorothy Thompson