New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEYNow, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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The highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
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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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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!
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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 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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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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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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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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Friendship is far more human.
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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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But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
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And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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.
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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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I forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
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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