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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
Last
World
Civilized
Protection
Private
Conscience
Lasts

More quotes by Martha Gellhorn

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I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.
Martha Gellhorn
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It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.
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 a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.
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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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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Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy.
Martha Gellhorn
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I feel very troubled in the head and heart.
Martha Gellhorn
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But now that the guerrilla fighting is over, the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did.
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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Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.
Martha Gellhorn
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travel is compost for the mind
Martha Gellhorn
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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.
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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I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Martha Gellhorn
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The world's fat is badly divided.
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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Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.
Martha Gellhorn
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Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.
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