Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEYI feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
-
-
Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won’t hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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 -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Friendship is far more human.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
AGNES SMEDLEY