Dorothy Thompson Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Dorothy Thompson
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. 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
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
Children want to feel instinctively that their father is behind them as solid as a mountain, but, like a mountain, is something to look up to.

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

Dorothy Thompson
I want to propose to you a conspiracy of poets to offset the innumerable conspiracies which have made this world a nightmare.... We need the intuitive imagination of the great poets, to comprehend in even a small way the nature of the forces that are moving the world.

Dorothy Thompson
We all make, I think, traitors of our memories (to credit our own lies).

Dorothy Thompson
Spiritual truth is truth in whatever age, but the tasks of its service change as society changes.

Dorothy Thompson
The United States is the only great and populous nation-state and world power whose people are not cemented by ties of blood, race or original language.

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

Dorothy Thompson
I am inclined to think that the flowers we most love are those we knew when we were very young, when our senses were most acute to color and to smell, and our natures most lyrical.

Dorothy Thompson
People and societies who cannot see any purpose in their existence beyond the material and the tangible must live chartlessly, and must live in spiritual misery, because they cannot overcome the greatest fact and mystery of human life, next to birth, which is death.

Dorothy Thompson
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. … His movements are awkward. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline.
And yet, he is not without a certain charm. But it is the soft almost feminine charm of the Austrian! When he talks it is with a broad Austrian dialect. The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroidic, they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.

Dorothy Thompson
It is true that the techniques of war are constantly "improved" as the genius of an age of invention is put in the service of the war machine. But that is not what is most disturbing. What is revolutionary is that the minds of men, women and children are being deliberately trained, directed, distorted, by every conceivable instrument of education and propaganda, to make them tolerant of war, receptive of war, prepared for war, lovers of war. The greatest menace in the world is not poison gas. There are gas masks against that. The menace is poisoned words, poisoned ideas.

Dorothy Thompson
Never interrupt an artist in the middle of his work! You are inflicting agony upon him.

Dorothy Thompson
What was once Sinclair Lewis is buried in no ground. Even in life he was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts, and of medical men who, as youths, were inspired by Martin Arrowsmith.

Dorothy Thompson
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 a tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson
The most dangerous illusion from which free men suffer is the widely held idea that freedom maintains itself by the mere fact of its being.

Dorothy Thompson
The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.

Dorothy Thompson
It is quite hard at times to distinguish a genius from a lunatic.

Dorothy Thompson
As far as I can see, I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. … My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. This is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says that Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people — an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are German you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen to one.

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

Dorothy Thompson
Disillusion comes only to the illusioned. One cannot be disillusioned of what one never put faith in.

Dorothy Thompson
Nobody knows anything about America who does not know its little towns.

Dorothy Thompson
It seems to me that as my child was born I was full of agony and full of laughter. Then I remember that there was an earthquake, some cosmic catastrophe; the world opened up and all the stars fell, and I died. And when I woke again the world had never, never seemed so sweet.

Dorothy Thompson
Children are little anarchists, possessed, however, of a powerful herd instinct, leading them to demand oppressive conformity from others, and especially conformity to their own primitive urges.

Dorothy Thompson