Agnes Smedley Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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