Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on ‘The Taste of Lies’)

“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.”— American war correspondent, novelist and travel writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The Face of War (1959)

We are about to see how many Americans will continue to fall for “the taste of lives,” as they have done since 2016. A quarter century since Ms. Gellhorn's death, lies in this country have not only become appetizing but addictive.

Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II—two military conflicts resulting from the lies of Fascism—also implicitly revealed why so many people fall under the sway of this hideous approach to government when she wrote, “Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”