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.
AGNES SMEDLEYI forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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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More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
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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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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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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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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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Friendship is far more human.
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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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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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 shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY