Martha Gellhorn Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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
All amateur travellers have experienced horror journeys, long or short, sooner or later, one way or another. As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

Martha Gellhorn
It would be impossible to explain the last war to these children, let alone preparations for another. They really know about war and what it does to life.... Adults could not persuade these small survivors that it is always necessary to make the world safe for democracy, but never safe for children.

Martha Gellhorn
Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience — war devastating their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.

Martha Gellhorn
I wrote out the accumulated rage and grief of the past two years in this one story, one small aspect of the ignoble history of our time.

Martha Gellhorn
Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.

Martha Gellhorn
There will have to be a terrible justice, blowing over the world, to avenge all the needless suffering. Thus far, she had seen the innocent punished and insulted, pursued and destroyed; and when they tried to protect themselves, their enemies were swift, unanimous and relentless.

Martha Gellhorn
We are not loved abroad and I see no reason to expect love, but our exported picture of ourselves is a disaster.

Martha Gellhorn
The English don't go in for imagination: imagination is considered to be improper if not downright alarmist.

Martha Gellhorn
Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.

Martha Gellhorn
The private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.

Martha Gellhorn
In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.

Martha Gellhorn
If I were a first rate writer, I wouldn't mind a bit. What does depress me is this: it is so desperately hard and so obsessive and so lonely to write that, in return for all this work, one would like a little self satisfaction. And that is never going to come, for the simple reason that I do not deserve it. I cannot be a good enough writer. You see? I call it grim. But the future looks awfully clear to me.

Martha Gellhorn
After they had public opinion all properly shaped, what good did it do? It was immensely easy to make people hate, but it was almost impossible to make them help.

Martha Gellhorn
From the earliest wars of men to our last heart-breaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future.

Martha Gellhorn
We lisp in numbers, in the U.S. We are deluged by ample, often mysterious statistics.... Like many in this country, I have come to regard statistics with doubt and merely as a hint of the probable shape of fact.

Martha Gellhorn
Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.

Martha Gellhorn
By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.

Martha Gellhorn