Dorothy Thompson Quotes
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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.
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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.’
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The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.
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Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men?
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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.’
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Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion.
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In these ten years urban Russia having destroyed, exiled, or reduced to the most abject misery all representatives of that previous civilization, is without most bourgeoisie amenities.
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The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness.
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To have felt too much is to end in feeling nothing.
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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.
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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.’
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Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.
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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.
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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.
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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;…
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
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Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
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The instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.
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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.
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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?