But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
AGNES SMEDLEYEverybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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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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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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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
AGNES SMEDLEY