Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Thompson

Worship, Dorothy Thompson suggests, isn’t a decorative add-on to human life; it’s appetite-level. Pairing devotion with eating is a deliberately unsentimental move from a journalist who spent her career watching mass politics, propaganda, and fear turn into public ritual. The line strips “faith” of its special pleading and treats it as a bodily drive: persistent, recurring, capable of being satisfied well or poisoned fast.

The specific intent is to relocate worship from the church to the human psyche. Thompson isn’t just talking about religion; she’s naming the broader impulse to surrender to something bigger than the self, to find order, meaning, and belonging. That’s why the comparison lands: nobody argues themselves into hunger. You manage it, you redirect it, you feed it. Same with worship. It will attach to something.

The subtext has teeth. If worship is instinct, then secular societies don’t become non-worshipping; they become differently worshipping. Ideologies, leaders, nations, even “common sense” can take on the emotional posture of the sacred. Coming out of the early-to-mid 20th century, Thompson had reason to be wary of what happens when that impulse is hijacked by charismatic authority and mass spectacle. Her era offered a grim demonstration of how quickly political movements can provide liturgy, symbols, enemies, and salvation narratives.

What makes the quote work is its cool compression: it universalizes without romanticizing. The warning embedded in the metaphor is practical: you can’t starve an instinct out of existence, but you can be careful about what you consume.