Martha Gellhorn

journalist from the United States (1908–1998)

Martha Ellis Gellhorn (8 November 190815 February 1998) was an American war correspondent and novelist. She covered nearly every war during the twentieth century.

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

Quotes

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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.
    • Notebook entry, quoted in Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2003) by Caroline Moorehead, p. 88.
  • 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.
    • Letter as quoted in Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2003) written by Caroline Moorehead, pg. 142.
  • War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
    • Letter as quoted in Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2003) written by Caroline Moorehead.
  • Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
    • Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir (1978) by Martha Gellhorn.
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