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.
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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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.
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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.
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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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I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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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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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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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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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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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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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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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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Friendship is far more human.
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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.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY