Martha Gellhorn Quotes

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

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.

Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.

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.

I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life.

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

All politicians are bores and liars and fakes. I talk to people.

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

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

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.

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

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

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

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

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

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

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

travel is compost for the mind

The world's fat is badly divided.

[On Paris:] I do not know any city so beautiful and you can be unhappy there and notice your unhappiness less, having the city to look at.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

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.

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

Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

You have to stop living in order to write.

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

I feel very troubled in the head and heart.

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

I didn't write. I just wandered about.

[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.

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

the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.

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.

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.

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

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

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.

Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.

I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.