Whittaker Chambers Quotes & Sayings

First and foremost, he never imputes a base motive to anyone else. If someone is rude to him, he assumes that the rudeness is unintentional. If he knows that it is intentional, he acts as if it were not. He never insulted anyone himself except by intention. He never met anger with anger. He never patronized anyone because he never assumed that he knew more than anyone else or that uneducated people are unintelligent. He never corrected (or smiled at) other people's slips. "Always," my mother would say, "allow other people the luxury of being mistaken. They will find out for themselves soon enough. If they don't, they are the kind of people in whom it does — Whittaker Chambers

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

Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man. — Whittaker Chambers

The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself. — Whittaker Chambers

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory. — Whittaker Chambers

True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness. — Whittaker Chambers

As I continued to pray raggedly, prayer ceased to be an awkward and self-conscious act. It became a daily need to which I looked forward. If, for any reason, I were deprived of it, I was distressed as if I had been deprived of some life necessity, like water. I cannot say I changed. There tore through me a transformation with the force of a river, which, dammed up and diverted for a lifetime, bursts its way back to its true channel. I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not. — Whittaker Chambers

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

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

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

Be realized when, in 1937, I introduced him in New York City, to Colonel Boris Bykov. At St. Matthews Court, Collins lived alone. He was separated from his wife (he has since married Susan B. Anthony III). He had a son about ten years old whom I met once when he was visiting his father (on some holiday — Whittaker Chambers

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

I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. — Whittaker Chambers

... my century..is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form ... . — Whittaker Chambers

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

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

[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim. — Whittaker Chambers

Throughout the most trying phase of the Case, Nixon and his family, and sometimes his parents, were at our farm, encouraging me and comforting my family. My children have caught him lovingly in a nickname. To them, he is always "Nixie," the kind and the good, about whom they will tolerate no nonsense. His somewhat martial Quakerism sometimes amused and always heartened me. I have a vivid picture of him, in the blackest hour of the Hiss Case, standingby the barn and saying in his quietly savage way (he is the kindest of men): "If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil. — Whittaker Chambers

The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power. — Whittaker Chambers

The next time I met Ulrich, he asked me: "Do you know what sookin sin is?" I — Whittaker Chambers

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

Men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves ... . For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made. — Whittaker Chambers

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself. — Whittaker Chambers

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

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

The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. — Whittaker Chambers

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

Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom. Necessity is the only ultimate justification known to the mind. — Whittaker Chambers

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

It taught me that ... there can be no true humility and no true compassion where there is no courage. — Whittaker Chambers

Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. — Whittaker Chambers

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

Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment. — Whittaker Chambers

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. 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. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. — Whittaker Chambers

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

A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism. — Whittaker Chambers

I do not know any way to explain why God's grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it. — Whittaker Chambers

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

The No. 1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. The No. 2 source in the same Department was Henry Julian Wadleigh, an expert in the Trade Agreements Division, to which he had managed to have himself transferred from the Agriculture Department. He had done so at the request of the Communist Party — Whittaker Chambers

Man without mysticism is a monster. — Whittaker Chambers

In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. — Whittaker Chambers

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

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

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

Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible. — Whittaker Chambers

The Communist vision is the vision of man without God. — Whittaker Chambers

I had already been warned by other sources - and was soon to be warned by the Committee - that the Justice Department was preparing to move against me, that it was actively making plans to indict me, and not Alger Hiss, for perjury on the basis of my testimony before the House Committee. I felt that my testimony had offended the powers that for so long had kept from the nation the extent of the Communist infiltration of Government, and the official heights to which it had reached. Not Alger Hiss (for denying any of the truth), but I (for revealing part of the truth) was to be punished. — Whittaker Chambers

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

Hence that morganatic bond between the forces of the left and the forces of the right (a director of a big steel company, the co-owner of a great department store, a figure high in the Republican organization, come quickly to mind) which made confusing common cause in exculpating Hiss by defaming Chambers. — Whittaker Chambers

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

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