Martha Gellhorn Quotes & Sayings

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

After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat. — Martha Gellhorn

... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

You have to stop living in order to write. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

I feel very troubled in the head and heart. — 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

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

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. — Martha Gellhorn

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival. — Martha Gellhorn

He had no other life and no other knowledge; he knew that he could not live anywhere now because in his mind, slyly, there was nothing but horror. — Martha Gellhorn

On the night of New Year's Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year's resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it. — Martha Gellhorn

The ends never justify the means because IT never ends. — Martha Gellhorn

What was new to our ears these days, and thrilling to hear, was the steadiness and justice of those who spoke, the abscence of panic and exaggeration the quiet insistence on legal processes as opposed to trial by suspicion. McCarthyism so repelled the English that they take special care not to be infected by it. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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

In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in the tapped hotel telephone, you do notice that people look over their shoulders when talking in restaurants - the secret police are dormant but not forgotten; you feel in your bones, as you would a threatening change in the weather, every change in Russian mood or action. This is not and air we have ever breathed; I doubt if we would be strong enough to resist such a climate and stay as healthy in spirit as the Poles. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

I feel terribly strange, like a shadow, and full of dread. I dread the time ahead, the amputating time, I do not see how to manage it. I do not want the world to go dark and narrow and mean, and the world has been very unlovely in my eyes, and I very unlovely in it ... — Martha Gellhorn

People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

If there is a war, then all of the things most of us do won't matter any more. I have a feeling that one has to work all day and all night and live too, and swim and get the sun one's hair and laugh and love as many people as one can find around and do this all terribly fast, because the time getting shorter and shorter every day. — Martha Gellhorn

I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents. — Martha Gellhorn

Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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

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

What gave these krauts a right to say who should be born and who shouldn't, and who could live and be let alone, and who would get caught and killed? — Martha Gellhorn

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

I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue. — 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

I only knew about daily life. It was said, well, it isn't everybody's daily life. That is why I started. — Martha Gellhorn

[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. — Martha Gellhorn

But the soul concerns me; and I am beginning to wonder whether it is wise or useful to spend so much time searching for one's own. — Martha Gellhorn

[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. — Martha Gellhorn

My kind of loneliness now has no cure, you know; it is something I expect to live with until I die. Friends are heavenly kind, sometimes fun; it would be fatal not to have them. But I by no means need or want daily contact; perhaps it takes as much out of me as it gives, perhaps takes more. — Martha Gellhorn

I love you. Have a hell of a good time. I don't really know what else is worth having. — 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

A dock worker from East Ham also spoke of freedom. "You'll never find the English going Communist" he said. "We don't like it. It's not true Communism, it dictatorial. We want to say what we think. I'm a republican myself and I don't like the Royal Family. They all look as if a good day's work would kill them". — Martha Gellhorn

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

People do not yet realize (because the mind isn't built that way) what war can be. They fear it but surely they fear it the way children fear nightmares, dimly, without definite images in their heads of how it will all work out. — 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

Our hearts are light and gay because now its happening, we're starting, we're travelling again. — Martha Gellhorn

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on. — Martha Gellhorn

I didn't write. I just wandered about. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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

I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future, or any future. — 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

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? — Martha Gellhorn

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

I followed the war wherever I could reach it. — 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

travel is compost for the mind — Martha Gellhorn

The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable. — 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

The world's fat is badly divided. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

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

Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders. — Martha Gellhorn

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way. — Martha Gellhorn

Italy was about churches, Greece it's ruins; but Israel was about surviving and about feeling glad. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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

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. — Martha Gellhorn

Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved ... stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men. — Martha Gellhorn

People miss a great deal by being sensible. — Martha Gellhorn

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining, ... Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives. — Martha Gellhorn

And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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

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

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. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand. — 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

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

It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travelers. The sensible approach would be to the expect the worst, the very worst, that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory. — Martha Gellhorn

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

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

People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — Martha Gellhorn

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. — 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

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. — Martha Gellhorn