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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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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
War
Government
Endemic
Human
Carriers
Humans
Carrier
Governments
Lifetime
Watching
Disease

More quotes by Martha Gellhorn

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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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travel is compost for the mind
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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.
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I didn't write. I just wandered about.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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 daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.
Martha Gellhorn
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I feel very troubled in the head and heart.
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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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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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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Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.
Martha Gellhorn
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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
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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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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