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the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.

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
World
Civilized
Protection
Private
Conscience
Lasts
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More quotes by 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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Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.
Martha Gellhorn
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I feel very troubled in the head and heart.
Martha Gellhorn
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Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
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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The world's fat is badly divided.
Martha Gellhorn
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travel is compost for the mind
Martha Gellhorn
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I didn't write. I just wandered about.
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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
Martha Gellhorn