When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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The highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
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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






