"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!""
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live."
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth."
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear, a disastrous circle."
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"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."
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"Lawlessness is a self-perpetuating, ever-expanding habit."
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"After the earthquake and the fire comes the still, small voice."
— Dorothy Thompson (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)
"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 (1883-1961)