Martha Gellhorn quotes

Martha Gellhorn was an influential American journalist and war correspondent renowned for her fearless reporting from conflict zones around the world. Her work covered major events of the twentieth century, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II and beyond. She remains a pioneering figure in journalism, inspiring generations of reporters. Here are 32 of her quotes:

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

Martha Gellhorn

I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.

Martha Gellhorn

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

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

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

Martha Gellhorn

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

The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.

Martha Gellhorn

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Martha Gellhorn

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

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

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

I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.

Martha Gellhorn

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

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

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

Martha Gellhorn

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

Martha Gellhorn

If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.

Martha Gellhorn

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

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

Martha Gellhorn

It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.

Martha Gellhorn

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

I didn't write. I just wandered about.

Martha Gellhorn