Martha Gellhorn Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Martha Gellhorn
Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

Martha Gellhorn
Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

Martha Gellhorn
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Martha Gellhorn
Stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

Martha Gellhorn
In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.

Martha Gellhorn
I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.

Martha Gellhorn
Never believe governments, not any of them, not a word they say; keep an untrusting eye on all they do.

Martha Gellhorn
The English are very proud of their Parliament, and week in, week out, century after century, they have pretty good cause to be.

Martha Gellhorn
Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.

Martha Gellhorn
People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.'... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

Martha Gellhorn
The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

Martha Gellhorn
The little gray man in the police station was not one, he was anyone. No, he was one; and one alone matters and the world would never believe in any system where one is not important.

Martha Gellhorn
Journalism at its best and most effective is education. Apparently people would not learn for themselves, nor from others.

Martha Gellhorn
The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.

Martha Gellhorn
After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

Martha Gellhorn
I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

Martha Gellhorn
Of the defeat of the Spanish Republic: I daresay we all became more competent press tourists because of it, since we never again cared so much. You can only love one war; afterward, I suppose, you do your duty.

Martha Gellhorn
'Freedom' is the most expensive possession there is; it has to be paid for with loneliness.

Martha Gellhorn
People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time.

Martha Gellhorn
Despite official drivel about clean bombs and tactical nuclear weapons, anyone who can read a newspaper or listen to a radio knows that some of us mortals have the power to destroy the human race and man's home on earth. We need not even make war; only by preparing, by playing with our new weapons, we poison the air, the water, the soil of our plants, damage the health of the living, and weaken the chances of the newborn.

Martha Gellhorn
It is charming the way everyone in the South says, 'Come back.' This is the regulation farewell at gas stations, soda fountains, general stores, tourist camps. 'Come back,' they call, 'come back.' Do they feel marooned in one place, lost, needing to believe someone will return to share their exile on the similar main streets, in the varied but always new-looking land?

Martha Gellhorn
My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.

Martha Gellhorn
Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.

Martha Gellhorn
A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart and put it back into its normal condition, as a tough somewhat scarred but operating organ.

Martha Gellhorn
It is amazing how permanent a place can look, how rooted and unchanging the populace, when there are no burned tanks beside the road, no buildings split in half, no fields scooped by shell fire.

Martha Gellhorn
You go into a hospital, and it's full of wounded kids. So you write what you see and how it is. You don't say there's 37 wounded children in this hospital, but maybe there's 38 wounded children on the other side. You write what you see.

Martha Gellhorn
Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

Martha Gellhorn
America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help — because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.

Martha Gellhorn
If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.

Martha Gellhorn