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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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We Lisp In Numbers,

Martha Gellhorn

...

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.

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In November You Begin To Know How Long The Winter Will Be.

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.

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.

Officialdom Is Hostile To Inquiring Outsiders.

I Feel Very Troubled In The Head And Heart.

The Private Conscience Is The Last And Only Protection Of The Civilized World.

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

The Ends Never Justify The Means Because It Never Ends.

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.

Stop Spying On The Lawful Citizenry. Democracy And Dossiers Go Ill Together. It Is All Right For God But All Wrong For The State To Keep Its Eye On Sparrows.

I Daresay I Was The Worst Bed Partner In Five Continents.

Public Opinion, Though Slow As Lava, In The End Forces Governments Towards More Sanity, More Justice. My Heroes And Heroines Are All Private Citizens.

America Has Made No Reparation To The Vietnamese, Nothing. We Are The Richest People In The World And They Are Among The Poorest. We Savaged Them, Though They Had Never Hurt Us, And We Cannot Find It In Our Hearts, Our Honor, To Give Them Help-because The Government Of Vietnam Is Communist. And Perhaps Because They Won.

The World's Fat Is Badly Divided.

There Were Ten Concentration Camps In France From 1939 On.

It Is Charming The Way Everyone In The South Says, 'come Back.' This Is The Regulation Farewell At Gas Stations, Soda Fountains, General Stores, Tourist Camps. 'come Back,' They Call, 'come Back.' Do They Feel Marooned In One Place, Lost, Needing To Believe Someone Will Return To Share Their Exile On The Similar Main Streets, In The Varied But Always New-looking Land?

My Definition Of What Makes A Journey Wholly Or Partially Horrible Is Boredom.

If I Were A First Rate Writer, I Wouldn't Mind A Bit. What Does Depress Me Is This: It Is So Desperately Hard And So Obsessive And So Lonely To Write That, In Return For All This Work, One Would Like A Little Self Satisfaction. And That Is Never Going To Come, For The Simple Reason That I Do Not Deserve It. I Cannot Be A Good Enough Writer. You See? I Call It Grim. But The Future Looks Awfully Clear To Me.

Life Is Not Long At All, Never Long Enough, But Days Are Very Long Indeed.

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.

I Found Out About The Spanish War Because I Was In Germany When It Began.

Once You Get A Tyranny, You Don't Easily Get Rid Of It. Much Better To Remember About Eternal Vigilance.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

I Didn't Write. I Just Wandered About.

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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.

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I Do Not See Myself As A Footnote To Someone Else's Life.

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.

I See Mysteries And Complications Wherever I Look, And I Have Never Met A Steadily Logical Person.

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.

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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.

It Would Be A Bitter Cosmic Joke If We Destroy Ourselves Due To Atrophy Of The Imagination.

Journalism At Its Best And Most Effective Is Education. Apparently People Would Not Learn For Themselves, Nor From Others.

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Dachau Has Been My Own Lifelong Point Of No Return. Between The Moment When I Walked Through The Gate Of That Prison, With Its Infamous Motto, 'arbeit Macht Frei,' And When I Walked Out At The End Of A Day That Had No Ordinary Scale Of Hours, I Was Changed, And How I Looked At The Human Condition, The World We Live In, Changed ... Years Of War Had Taught Me A Great Deal, But War Was Nothing Like Dachau. Compared To Dachau, War Was Clean.

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You Have To Stop Living In Order To Write.

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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.

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