I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEYI 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.
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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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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 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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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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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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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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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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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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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY