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.
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote warns against losing our creativity and imagination, suggesting that our failure to innovate may lead to our downfall.
Martha Gellhorn's quote reflects a profound concern about the human condition, emphasizing that the decline of our imaginative capabilities can lead us to self-destruction. It suggests that without creativity and the ability to envision alternative futures, humanity may fall into complacency or despair, ultimately causing its own demise. This statement serves as a reminder of the importance of nurturing our imagination and striving for innovative solutions as a safeguard against societal decline.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a discussion on the importance of creativity in education.
More from Martha Gellhorn
All quotes βthe ends never justify the means because IT never ends.
Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.
I followed the war wherever I could reach it.
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.
By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.
Similar quotes
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.
There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.
All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.