Martha Gellhorn Quotes

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

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.

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

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

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

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.

In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.

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

In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the work; but at the last camp everything was stolen.

travel is compost for the mind

Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.

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.

But now that the guerrilla fighting is over, the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did.

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

The human spirit can be indomitable and it is this rare quality that is not at all to be expected that makes survivors of us all, the human race in the grand scheme of things.

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

I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.

Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it.

Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

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.

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

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.

It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.

What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain.

Journalism at its best and most effective is education.

Apparently people would not learn for themselves, nor from others.

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.

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.

I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

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.

... people miss a great deal by being sensible.

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.

Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience - war devasting 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.

The world's fat is badly divided.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it

I didn't write. I just wandered about.

perhaps these men in the House Caucus Room [Committee on Un-American Activities] are determined to spread silence: to frighten those voices which will shout no, and ask questions, defend the few, attack cruelty and proclaim the rights and dignity of man. ... America is going to look very strange to Americans and they will not be at home here, for the air will slowly become unbreathable to all forms of life except sheep.

[On the United States:] We are a wildly energetic people in our pursuit of pleasure, let alone in our pursuit of money, and we are very odd to look at as we go about our lives.

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.

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

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?

I feel very troubled in the head and heart.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I used to write letters to the wounded in the Palace Hotel, and I used to drive a station wagon with blood in bottles to a battalion aid station.