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 SMEDLEYAnd 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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Friendship is far more human.
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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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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 forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
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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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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 have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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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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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEY