I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEYNo one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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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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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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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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.
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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
AGNES SMEDLEY