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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.

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
Things
Rare
Expected
Quality
Indomitable
Race
Survivors
Makes
Scheme
Spirit
Survivor
Human
Schemes
Humans
Grand

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Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.
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[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.
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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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Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I feel very troubled in the head and heart.
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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.
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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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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.
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Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.
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.
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the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.
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I didn't write. I just wandered about.
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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.
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It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.
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I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.
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I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.
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