Agnes Smedley Quotes

An educated proletariat is a constant source of disturbance and danger to any nation.

That’s a very bourgeois notion. We’ve got enemies all around us, White Russians against the revolution, massive unemployment. We can’t have freedom of speech.

I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.

As a result, ways out of the crisis are being intensively searched for at all levels - ways, which, however, aim at maintaining the whites' control over the country.

The vast concourse of people who had assembled to witness the triumphant arrival of the successful travellers was of the lowest orders of mechanics and artisans, among whom great distress and a dangerous spirit of discontent with the government at that time prevailed.

To judge from all Communist papers, magazines and brochures, and from all public assemblies, one might even surmise that a revolt of the poor peasants in Western Europe might break out at any moment!

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.

Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend them against the overtaxed.

The "have nots" outnumber the "haves." No wonder the ruling class of every country grows more and more alarmed.

We believe this is a most ill-judged and suicidal act ... from which we should emerge only through blood and fire or chains and slavery more dire than any we have yet known. There are men earning 15/-, 20/-, 25/- and 30/- a week. I ask, will those men be likely, in a body, to keep the Sacred Holiday? I say not; and, if not, who will be sacrificed? The answer is easy. The most determined, resolute and oppressed.

In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us.

Listen, 'The Purge' actually exists in some form or another in many places around the world when you think about it.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.

Nobody really knows for sure how the Boxer Rebellion started. It began among the poor, and the history of the poor is rarely written down.

I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

Occupy Wall Street was a disorganized movement without a clear focus and power base - essential in any successful revolution - but the message was clear: the divisions between those who are fortunate enough to enjoy city living as opposed to those who find it unbearable are too wide.

We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?

Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.

The working classes were becoming more and more sharply aware of the complex causes of international malaise.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.