Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEYMuch that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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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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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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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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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 would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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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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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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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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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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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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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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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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Friendship is far more human.
AGNES SMEDLEY