Daily Inspiration Quote by Martha Gellhorn

Citizenship, in Gellhorn's hands, is stripped of pageantry and recast as labor: a "tough occupation" with hours, hazards, and accountability. The line is doing something sly. It borrows the language of jobs - obligation, toughness, standing by your work - to puncture the comforting idea that civic life is a mood or a logo. If democracy is a workplace, then passivity isn't neutrality; it's absenteeism.

Gellhorn's journalism, forged in the brutal clarity of war reporting and the moral mess of 20th-century politics, sits behind every word. She watched propaganda move faster than truth, watched ordinary people become collateral damage, watched officials launder violence through euphemism. So "make his own informed opinion" isn't a self-help mantra about independent thinking; it's a warning about how easily opinions are manufactured when citizens outsource their attention. The subtext: power counts on your exhaustion, on your confusion, on your willingness to treat politics like weather.

Then comes the kicker: "stand by it". Not "have" an opinion, not "express" one, but commit to it. Gellhorn is arguing for a civic spine - the kind that costs you comfort, friends, status, maybe safety. Yet she isn't romanticizing stubbornness. "Informed" is the guardrail against ideology as identity. The sentence sets a high bar because she assumes the stakes are high: when citizenship becomes spectatorship, someone else writes the script, and it rarely favors the powerless.