Quote

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

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
Disease
War
Government
Endemic
Human
Carriers
Humans
Carrier
Governments
Lifetime
Watching

More quotes by 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
I didn't write. I just wandered about.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
travel is compost for the mind
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
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
My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
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
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
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
The world's fat is badly divided.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
[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
Image
the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Martha Gellhorn
Image
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gellhorn