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Martha Gellhorn

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

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "The Lord Will Provide for England," in Collier's ()
  • 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.

  • The little gray man in the police station was not one, he was anyone. No, he was one; and one alone matters and the world would never believe in any system where one is not important.

  • ... there will have to be a terrible justice, blowing over the world, to avenge all the needless suffering. Thus far, she had seen the innocent punished and insulted, pursued and destroyed; and when they tried to protect themselves, their enemies were swift, unanimous and relentless.

  • 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,
    • in 1985 afterward, A Stricken Field ()
  • ... in November you begin to know how long the winter will be.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "November Afternoon," The Heart of Another ()
  • [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,
    • "Good Will to Men," The Heart of Another ()
  • The world's fat is badly divided.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "Journey Through a Peaceful Land," in The New Republic ()
  • We are not loved abroad and I see no reason to expect love, but our exported picture of ourselves is a disaster.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "Journey Through a Peaceful Land," in The New Republic ()
  • 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,
    • "Journey Through a Peaceful Land," in The New Republic ()
  • [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,
    • "Journey Through a Peaceful Land," in The New Republic ()
  • ... 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,
    • "Cry Shame," in The New Republic ()
  • ... 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 later afterward, Point of No Return ()
  • 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,
    • "The Children Pay," in Saturday Evening Post ()
  • In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "It Don't Matter Who Gets In, Dear," in The New Republic ()
  • After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "Eichmann and the Private Conscience," in The Atlantic ()
  • ... people miss a great deal by being sensible.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "Monkeys on the Roof," in Ladies' Home Journal ()
  • 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,
    • "A Tale of Two Wars," in Ave Maria ()
  • Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "Christmas With the Outcast," in The Observer ()
  • 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.

  • 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,
    • "White Into Black," in Granta ()
  • Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • "White Into Black," in Granta ()
  • 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,
    • "On Torture," in Granta ()
  • 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.

  • ... 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.

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

  • You have to stop living in order to write.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • in Caroline Moorehead, ed., Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn ()
  • 'Freedom' is the most expensive possession there is; it has to be paid for with loneliness.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • in Caroline Moorehead, ed., Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn ()
  • Journalism at its best and most effective is education. Apparently people would not learn for themselves, nor from others.

    • Martha Gellhorn,
    • introduction, The Face of War ()
  • 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,
    • introduction, The Face of War ()
  • The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.

Martha Gellhorn, U.S. writer, journalist, one of greatest war correspondents

(1908 - 1998)

Full name: Martha Ellis Gellhorn. Married Ernest Hemingway.