Martha Gellhorn Quotes

They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.

The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity.

On one hand, I think people are destined for something incredible if we don't wipe ourselves out, but I think we're going to wipe 90 percent of ourselves out.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Something happens to our creativity as we go through the education process; most of us lose touch with it.

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

Although technology has enhanced our lives in many ways, it has also ensured the erosion of imagination.

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

When kids look at broccoli, they call it 'little trees,' because they see it not just for the word 'broccoli.' They see it for what it looks like, the image. We, as adults, forget to think like that. We forget to think figuratively and have to be reminded.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, 'What are you doing this Saturday?' and they'll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, 'Man, I'm really into remote-controlled steamboats.'

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education.

SpongeBob is a complete innocent - not an idiot. SpongeBob never fully realizes how stupid Patrick is. They're whipping themselves up into situations - that's always where the humor comes from.

Perhaps I created the monster Ramsay, who ended up as a TV personality screaming at celebrities on 'Hell's Kitchen,' doing to them what I had done to him.

We are to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will be that as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.

There are three musts that hold us back: "I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy." And I sometimes think that as long as we keep the second must, which is socially learned, then some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and maybe annihilate the whole human race because they demand that the rest of the world must agree with their dogmas. When we don't agree, they may zap us.

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have . . . a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

The growing possibility of our destroying ourselves and the world with our own neglect and excess is tragic and very real.