I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Friendship is far more human.
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.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY