Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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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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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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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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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There are many men – such as those often to be found among the Indians – who are refined until they have qualities often attributed to the female sex. Yet they are men, and strong ones.
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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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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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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.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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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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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
AGNES SMEDLEY