For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEYNew York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 SMEDLEY -
There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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 -
So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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 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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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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Friendship is far more human.
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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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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 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 SMEDLEY






