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 SMEDLEYFor the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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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More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
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I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
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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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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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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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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 forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
AGNES SMEDLEY