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.
AGNES SMEDLEYI feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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.
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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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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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.
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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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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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There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
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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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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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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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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But I see no reason why a woman should not grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature, it matters not at all what they may be.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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 feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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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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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!
AGNES SMEDLEY