Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Fact
Data
Often
Mysterious
Facts
Shape
Lisp
Come
Merely
Ample
Country
Shapes
Hint
Many
Regard
Probable
Like
Numbers
Hints
Doubt
Statistics

More quotes by Martha Gellhorn

Image
I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
The world's fat is badly divided.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
Image
Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
Image
My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
Image
travel is compost for the mind
Martha Gellhorn
Image
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gellhorn