For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEYYet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won’t hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
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Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won’t hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
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But I see no reason why a woman should not grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature, it matters not at all what they may be.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
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There are many men – such as those often to be found among the Indians – who are refined until they have qualities often attributed to the female sex. Yet they are men, and strong ones.
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I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
AGNES SMEDLEY