Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Thompson

Peace, in Dorothy Thompson's hands, is not a mood; it's a project. The line snaps at a comforting fantasy that peace is what happens when people lower their voices and wait for history to settle down. Thompson flips that script: peace is something you build, and because it's built, it can be broken. "Created" is the tell - active, engineered, contested. "Maintained" is the second punch - upkeep, vigilance, the unglamorous work after the ribbon-cutting. She's arguing that peace isn't the absence of conflict so much as the presence of structures that keep conflict from turning predatory.

The subtext is a rebuke to the seductive moral pose of quietism. "Passivity" and "quietism" aren't just personal dispositions here; they're political strategies that often masquerade as virtue while handing power to the loudest actor in the room. Thompson, a journalist who covered the rise of European fascism and warned American audiences about Hitler when denial and appeasement were fashionable, is insisting that non-action is not neutral. It's an allocation of advantage.

Intent-wise, she writes against the interwar and pre-WWII temptation to confuse peace with avoidance - to treat engagement, deterrence, and collective responsibility as warmongering. The sentence works because it's built like a corrective: it grants the desire for peace, then refuses the easy method. It's also a journalist's ethic compressed into doctrine: clear-eyed about threats, impatient with performative innocence, and convinced that maintaining a livable world requires choosing sides, spending resources, and taking heat.