Talk:Dorothy Thompson

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

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

• 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.

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

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

• "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.

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

• 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.

• Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

• 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.

• People have confidence in women to get them out of trouble.

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

• 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.

• The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness.

• The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

• There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

• They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war— as though the absence of war was the same as peace.

• Well, it is our fate to live in a time of crisis. To live in a time when all forms and values are being challenged. In other and more easy times, it was not, perhaps, necessary for the individual to confront himself with a clear question: What is it that you really believe? What is it that you really cherish? What is it for which you might, actually, in a showdown, be willing to die? . . . I say, with all the reticence which such large, pathetic words evoke, that one cannot exist today as a person— one cannot exist in full consciousness— without having to have a showdown with one's self, without having to define what it is that one lives by, without being clear in one's mind what matters and what does not matter. (1939)

• 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.

"Peace is not the absence of conflict"

"Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives..."

This is widely misattributed to Thompson. I think this error originates with Seeds of Peace (1986), a compilation of quotations edited by Jeanne Larson. The error is not Larson's, but someone who read her book and misinterpreted it. The quotation can be found on page 261, immediately below a genuine quotation from Thompson ("They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war..." from her column "On the record"). Someone must have seen the "Peace is not the absence of conflict..." quotation, and seen Thompson's name above it, but they should have attributed it to the name below it. The "Peace is not the absence of conflict" is actually due to Jeanne Larson, presumably the same Jeanne Larson who edited the compilation. Cagliost (talk) 11:46, 5 April 2025 (UTC)