Martha Gellhorn Quotes

We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.

Part of ending any war responsibly is to support those who fought it

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

Remember all those references to Macedonia as the oasis of peace in the Balkans. You only really appreciate it when you have lost it.

I don't think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that's now history.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

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

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

The concept of military readiness is well understood, but readiness for what happens after the fighting stops is just as important.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

We need... to say to people that this is a temporary residential status, and we expect that, once there is peace in Syria again, once IS has been defeated in Iraq, that you go back to your home country with the knowledge that you have gained.

My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.

I left my home, and it was the most beautiful country in the world in my eyes, and I was always happy in the summertime to go back. And then suddenly, the civil war starts, and you just worry first about your family and friends, and then an entire nation.

Going back to South Sudan after the independence took place was deeply emotional for me because I had gone through the civil war with my family just before going to seek refuge in London.

The year when I left my country, there was still peace. The year after, the war broke out, a lot of people lost their homes, lost their families. When I go back 20 years later I still find people living in refugee camps. So I tried to help them find homes.

Educate yourself, learn about what refugees face when they don't have homes, after they have lost everything.

Sometimes people say to me, 'Well, what was the difference between Kosovo, which was a successful intervention, and Iraq and Afghanistan that have been so difficult?' And the answer is perfectly simple. In Kosovo, you have, after the removal of the loss of its regime, you had a process of political and economic reconstruction that took its part without the intervention of terrorism. If you had the intervention of terrorism, by the way, it would have been extremely difficult there - but we didn't.

Look at the results of regime change in Iraq. You can't possibly claim that it was successful.

Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.

We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.