Top 70 Martha Gellhorn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.”

— Martha Gellhorn

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

— Martha Gellhorn

4. “There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.”

— Martha Gellhorn

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

— Martha Gellhorn

6. “All politicians are bores and liars and fakes. I talk to people.”

— Martha Gellhorn

7. “Journalism at its best and most effective is education. Apparently people would not learn for themselves, nor from others.”

— Martha Gellhorn

8. “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

9. “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

10. “My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.”

— Martha Gellhorn

11. “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

12. “Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.”

— Martha Gellhorn

13. “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

14. “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

15. “You have to stop living in order to write.”

— Martha Gellhorn

16. “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

17. “And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.”

— Martha Gellhorn

18. “I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else’s life.”

— Martha Gellhorn

19. “I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.”

— Martha Gellhorn

20. “Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”

— Martha Gellhorn

21. “I am frightened and doubtful, and everyone who touches me must suffer.”

— Martha Gellhorn

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

— Martha Gellhorn

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

— Martha Gellhorn

24. “In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.”

— Martha Gellhorn

25. “I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future, or any future.”

— Martha Gellhorn

26. “I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”

— Martha Gellhorn

27. “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

28. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.”

— Martha Gellhorn

29. “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

30. “It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

— Martha Gellhorn

31. “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

32. “Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.”

— Martha Gellhorn

33. “I feel very troubled in the head and heart.”

— Martha Gellhorn

34. “Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.”

— Martha Gellhorn

35. “The latrine broke my lion heart.”

— Martha Gellhorn

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I love you. Have a hell of a good time. I don’t really know what else is worth having.”

— Martha Gellhorn

39. “The manipulated millions could be aroused or soothed by any lies. The guiding light of journalism was no stronger than a glow-worm.”

— Martha Gellhorn

40. “What gave these krauts a right to say who should be born and who shouldn’t, and who could live and be let alone, and who would get caught and killed?”

— Martha Gellhorn

41. “I want to read and write and be very quiet.”

— Martha Gellhorn

42. “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

43. “On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”

— Martha Gellhorn

44. “My kind of loneliness now has no cure, you know; it is something I expect to live with until I die. Friends are heavenly kind, sometimes fun; it would be fatal not to have them. But I by no means need or want daily contact; perhaps it takes as much out of me as it gives, perhaps takes more.”

— Martha Gellhorn

45. “In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the work; but at the last camp everything was stolen.”

— Martha Gellhorn

46. “I used to write letters to the wounded in the Palace Hotel, and I used to drive a station wagon with blood in bottles to a battalion aid station.”

— Martha Gellhorn

47. “Since I am devoted to my own freedom, I didn’t think it just to deny other people theirs; and a basic freedom must be to be bossed by your own kind, not by foreigners.”

— Martha Gellhorn

48. “I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.”

— Martha Gellhorn

49. “It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the “battle” around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them.”

— Martha Gellhorn

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

— Martha Gellhorn