Top 39 Whittaker Chambers Quotes
#4. A witness, in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.
Whittaker Chambers
#5. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
Whittaker Chambers
#6. The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
Whittaker Chambers
#7. Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence.
Whittaker Chambers
#8. A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.
Whittaker Chambers
#9. It taught me that ... there can be no true humility and no true compassion where there is no courage.
Whittaker Chambers
#11. The next time I met Ulrich, he asked me: "Do you know what sookin sin is?" I
Whittaker Chambers
#12. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.
Whittaker Chambers
#13. True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
Whittaker Chambers
#14. No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.
Whittaker Chambers
#15. It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.
Whittaker Chambers
#16. Is dirt nice? Is death nice? Above all is dying nice? And, in the end, we must ask, is God nice? I doubt it.
Whittaker Chambers
#17. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time - Communism and Freedom - came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men.
Whittaker Chambers
#18. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.
Whittaker Chambers
#19. [It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.
Whittaker Chambers
#20. It is popular to call it a crisis of the Western world. It is in fact a crisis of the whole world. Communism, which claims to be a solution of the crisis, is itself a symptom and an irritant of the crisis.
Whittaker Chambers
#22. I do not know any way to explain why God's grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it.
Whittaker Chambers
#23. For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.
Whittaker Chambers
#24. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death.
Whittaker Chambers
#26. I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.
Whittaker Chambers
#27. I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism. I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.
Whittaker Chambers
#28. On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.
Whittaker Chambers
#29. You don't understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana, "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Whittaker Chambers
#30. Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.
Whittaker Chambers
#31. When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.
Whittaker Chambers
#32. My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.
Whittaker Chambers
#33. Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.
Whittaker Chambers
#34. The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.
Whittaker Chambers
#36. The reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.
Whittaker Chambers
#37. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another.
Whittaker Chambers
#38. The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
Whittaker Chambers
#39. A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.
Whittaker Chambers
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