There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won’t hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
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 -
I forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 SMEDLEY -
When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
AGNES SMEDLEY