I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEYNew York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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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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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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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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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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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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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Friendship is far more human.
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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.
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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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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.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY