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.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
-
-
Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEY