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 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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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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I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions.
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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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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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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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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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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 have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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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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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’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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






