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

More quotes by 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 know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
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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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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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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Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.
Martha Gellhorn
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All amateur travellers have experienced horror journeys, long or short, sooner or later, one way or another. As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
Martha Gellhorn
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The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.
Martha Gellhorn
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the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.
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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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 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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I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.
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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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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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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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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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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I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.
Martha Gellhorn