Agnes Smedley

So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There were fifty-four…

— Agnes Smedley

Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and…

— Agnes Smedley

Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.…

— Agnes Smedley

But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money.…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

“...we live this one brief and precious hour called Life; ...it is not in keeping with the nobility of existence to keep…

— Agnes Smedley

Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man ... the highest joy is to fight by…

— Agnes Smedley

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has…

— Agnes Smedley

I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

In one hotel, the maid who built the fire fainted in our room. Exhaustion was the cause. We talked with her later…

— Agnes Smedley

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

— Agnes Smedley

I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat. I would…

— Agnes Smedley

I hate female men.

— Agnes Smedley

There are many men - such as those often to be found among the Indians - who are refined until they have…

— Agnes Smedley