For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEYMore and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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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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 -
Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
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Friendship is far more human.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEY