To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
AGNES SMEDLEYMy mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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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Friendship is far more human.
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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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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY