Faith & Spirit Quote by Dorothy Thompson

Thompson is arguing against the lazy fantasy that bad beliefs can be bullied out of existence. An idea with “faith” behind it isn’t just an opinion you can fact-check into submission; it’s a worldview that gives people meaning, identity, and permission to act. That’s why she insists the counterforce must be “another and better idea and faith” - not ridicule, not censorship, not technocratic fixes, not the thin gruel of “be reasonable.”

The line carries the hard-earned realism of a journalist who watched propaganda turn politics into religion. Thompson was one of the earliest American voices to warn about Hitler, and the phrasing reads like an antidote to the 1930s temptation: treat fascism as a temporary fever, clamp down, wait it out. She’s saying the opposite. When a movement offers a story of belonging and destiny, opponents who respond with mere procedures and polite skepticism get steamrolled. You have to meet myth with myth, and you have to believe your own alternative strongly enough that it can sustain sacrifice.

“Positively and fearlessly upheld” is the tell. She’s not describing a salon debate; she’s describing a contest for moral confidence in public. The subtext is a rebuke to elites who pride themselves on being above conviction, and to moderates who mistake neutrality for virtue. Thompson’s sentence is also a warning: if democratic societies don’t cultivate their own animating faith - in pluralism, dignity, truth-telling - they leave the field to anyone offering certainty.