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 SMEDLEYI have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant–one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 -
It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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 -
I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
AGNES SMEDLEY