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 SMEDLEYIn 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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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 forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
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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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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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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 have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
AGNES SMEDLEY






