Agnes Smedley American Quotations

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.

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

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.

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 have lived in the homes of workers; they live on boiled potatoes, black bread with lard spread on it instead of butter, and rotten beer.

Now and then some Party member would announce a study circle, and I would join it, along with some ten or twelve working men and women.

I have written for years of the Red Army, yet my first living contact with it was with these peasants. They did not understand me.