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 SMEDLEYThere’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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!
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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Friendship is far more human.
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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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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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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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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.
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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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY