To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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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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 feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY