Dorothy Thompson Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Dorothy Thompson

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

The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. — Dorothy Thompson

Passitivity and quietism are invitations to war. — Dorothy Thompson

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. — Dorothy Thompson

When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. — 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

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

Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes; why, why, why don't they take up their own causes and obvious needs? — Dorothy Thompson

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

Recreation is nothing but a change of work-an occupation for the hands by those who live by their brains, or for the brains by those who live by their hands. — Dorothy Thompson

When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished 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

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. — Dorothy Thompson

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light. — Dorothy Thompson

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. — Dorothy Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. — Dorothy Thompson

Inventive man has invented nothing
nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds. — Dorothy Thompson