Martha Gellhorn - War Quotes

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

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
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
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