Agnes Smedley Quotes

#1. Agnes Smedley also knows what the century knows: that we become what is done to us.

Vivian Gornick

#2. I have no country...my countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression- it does not matter where they are. With them I feel at home- we understand each other. Others are foreign to me." -Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth

Agnes Smedley

#3. Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

Agnes Smedley

#4. For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.

Agnes Smedley

#5. My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. 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.

Agnes Smedley

#6. In one hotel, the maid who built the fire fainted in our room. Exhaustion was the cause. We talked with her later and learned that she worked 17 hours a day and makes 95 marks a month - about 50 cents.

Agnes Smedley

#7. 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. It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.

Agnes Smedley

#8. 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 Smedley

#9. I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.

Agnes Smedley

#10. I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

Agnes Smedley

#11. Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.

Agnes Smedley

#12. 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. The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

Agnes Smedley

#13. I hate female men.

Agnes Smedley

#14. 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.

Agnes Smedley

#15. To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.

Agnes Smedley

#16. When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

Agnes Smedley

#17. 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 Smedley

#18. 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.

Agnes Smedley

#19. For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak.

Agnes Smedley

#20. Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man. I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.

Agnes Smedley

#21. Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man ... 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.

Agnes Smedley

#22. I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.

Agnes Smedley

#23. Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books ... 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

#24. Germany is in terrible condition this year. This is particularly true of the working masses, who are so undernourished that tuberculosis is having a rich harvest, particularly of adolescent children.

Agnes Smedley

#25. But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know.

Agnes Smedley

#26. No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

Agnes Smedley

#27. What a couple. I'm consumed into ashes. And he's always raking up the ashes and setting them on fire again.

Agnes Smedley

#28. 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

#29. More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England's back forever and free Europe itself. It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.

Agnes Smedley

#30. I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human.

Agnes Smedley

#31. 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.

Agnes Smedley

#32. But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.

Agnes Smedley

#33. 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.

Agnes Smedley

#34. So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.

Agnes Smedley

#35. I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat. I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.

Agnes Smedley

#36. There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

Agnes Smedley