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.
AGNES SMEDLEYTo die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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 forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
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.
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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
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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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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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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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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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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY






