Agnes Smedley Quotes

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.

I am become a hard, thankless, graceless girl, and it was the only way I could do it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; 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.

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

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

...we live this one brief and precious hour called Life; ...it is not in keeping with the nobility of existence to keep other human being in subjection..."
-Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I hate female men.

There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

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.

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

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

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.