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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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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
Matter
Employs
Needs
Torture
World
Ideology
Tyranny
Nations
Half
Form
Camouflaged
Government
Torturers

More quotes by Martha Gellhorn

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Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it
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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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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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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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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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travel is compost for the mind
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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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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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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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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I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life.
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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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
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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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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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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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I feel very troubled in the head and heart.
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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Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.
Martha Gellhorn
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I didn't write. I just wandered about.
Martha Gellhorn