New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEYI 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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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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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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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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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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
AGNES SMEDLEY