Friendship is far more human.
AGNES SMEDLEYWhen I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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The highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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 feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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 -
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 SMEDLEY -
It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY






