Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEYI have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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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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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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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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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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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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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY