Martha Gellhorn Quotes - Page 2

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

Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

You have to stop living in order to write.

The world's fat is badly divided.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

[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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.