Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
AGNES SMEDLEYI would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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.
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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper.
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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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Gambling in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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 -
For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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 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 forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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Friendship is far more human.
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I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now – yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.
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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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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