New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEYSo I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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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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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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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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 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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 SMEDLEY