Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEYThe 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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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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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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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.
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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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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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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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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!
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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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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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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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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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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No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
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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 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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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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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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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
AGNES SMEDLEY