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.
AGNES SMEDLEYBut there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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I 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.
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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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.
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But I see no reason why a woman should not grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature, it matters not at all what they may be.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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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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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
AGNES SMEDLEY