Dorothy Thompson Quotes

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.

The capitalism which Hitler fought was so-called ‘loan capitalism.’—Finance, and the great trusts and cartels depending upon the banks. Department stores were included because, as it happened, many of them had Jewish owners. Expropriate Department Store Owners! Nationalize the trusts and the banks! Break up the Great Estates!’

On the subject of the constitution Hitler was more explicit, though there again, I had to interrupt an address to an unseen gallery. ‘I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.’ So that’s that for the Republic.

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

I see the nations of the world arming in ways that have never before been known in the modern world. I am not speaking of new forms of poison gas, heavier or swifter bombing planes, or parachutes to land brigades of soldiers… 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 today is not poison gas. There are gas masks against that. The menace is poisoned words, poisoned ideas.

Democracy for most of us is not an ism. It is a way of life. It does not represent any rigid form of state or national organization. It is something constantly developing and unfolding, changing from day to day, making mistakes, advancing in this direction and retreating in that, but always animated by a few fundamental ideas: that men have a right to live their own lives, provided they don’t tread too heavily on other people’s toes;…

I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am willing to die for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I think to be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains can penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire, without reference to some dictator’s code to tell me what the national canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race. I shall pick no fight, nor seek to impose by force these standards on others. But let it be clear. If the fight comes unsolicited, I am not willing to die meekly, to surrender without effort. And that being so, am I still a pacifist?

A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters.

For it is no longer possible to regard Fascism as the friend of Christianity. And in making a cultural treaty with Hitler, Franco has laid Spain wide open to the penetration of Nazi ideology, which has been repeatedly denounced by the Pope himself as anti-Christian.

The object of mankind is not to live in a perfectly functioning universe, but to live in a tolerable universe, which means one suited to the nature and aspirations of human beings.

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: into the concept that out of the biologically potentially noble will come a leadership of super-bandits, who will plunder the world; to whom organized murder, terror, espionage, robbery, treachery, the use of the lie, rape — which is flourishing in present-day Germany — will seem the natural, even the organic way of life.
And indeed it is, if the inhibitions imposed upon men by centuries of tradition are once completely released.

Capitalism is the use of wealth in private hands to create more wealth. It is the existing world-wide modern system of organizing production and trade by private enterprise, free to seek profit by employing human labor. Its defenders argue that never, since the beginning of history, has there been such a thing as perfect equality and harmony;… and every know period of history had rich and poor, and that actually modern technology, plus liberal democracy, plus an increased social sense, plus Capitalism, have created the modern world, and that as far as the standard of living of the average man is concerned the modern world surpasses all previous epochs of history.

The publicly propagandized aims of communism are vaguely liberal. One can read the Daily Worker every day for a year without finding any clear exegesis of Communist principle. Like Hitler, Communists, outside their own ranks, promise all things to most men, denouncing only ‘monopolists’ ‘imperialists’ (and failing to provide a glossary for their meaning of these terms), opposing race discrimination, child labor, etc.

Communist parties are both legal and illegal, and the illegal structure governs the legal. But legality is an enormous aid to the illegal conspiracy. It prevents forthright action against the chief criminals; it leads to roundabout persecution; it enables the Communist to deceive simple, generous-hearted, and gullible citizens, and it leads to dubiously legal actions from the government itself. The present half-legal, half-persecuted position of the Party and its members is not justice. It operates to eliminate one evil with another, both evils containing dangers to the Constitutional order.

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 for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. [...] But 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. Since the great American tradition is Freedom and Democracy, you can bet that our dictator, God help us! will be a great democrat, through whose leadership alone democracy can be realized. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him or "Ave Caesar", nor will they call him "Fuehrer" 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!'