Martha Gellhorn Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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