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Martha Gellhorn Quotes about War

All Martha Gellhorn Quotes Country Heart Home Imagination War quotes Writing
After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

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

Martha Gellhorn
War, Government, Disease
Martha Gellhorn (1988). “The Face of War”, p.7, Atlantic Monthly Press

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
War, Years, Holocaust

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
War, Imagination, People
"Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life". Book by Caroline Moorehead, 2003.

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
War, Home, Men
Martha Gellhorn (1959). “The Face of War”

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

Martha Gellhorn
War, Umpires
Martha Gellhorn (2014). “The Face of War”, p.83, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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
Hurt, War, Heart

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
War, Heart, Men
Martha Gellhorn (2014). “The Face of War”, p.16, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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
War, Years, People

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

Martha Gellhorn
War, Germany, Found

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
War, Writing, Should

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