Martha Gellhorn Quotes
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I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
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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.
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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
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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.
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In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.
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You have to stop living in order to write.
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Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
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All politicians are bores and liars and fakes. I talk to people.
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Freedom' is the most expensive possession there is; it has to be paid for with loneliness.
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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.
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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.
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By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.
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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.
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I feel very troubled in the head and heart.
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I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life.
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I didn't write. I just wandered about.
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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.
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In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.
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Journalism at its best and most effective is education. Apparently people would not learn for themselves, nor from others.