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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

Martha Gellhorn

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Martha Gellhorn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 8
Died: 1998
Died: February 15
Journalist
Novelist
War Correspondent
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Martha Ellis Gellhorn
War
Write
Didn
Anything
Writing
Suggested
Somebody
Understand

More quotes by Martha Gellhorn

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I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life.
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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travel is compost for the mind
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn
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I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.
Martha Gellhorn
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Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.
Martha Gellhorn
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It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gellhorn
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the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.
Martha Gellhorn