Whittaker Chambers
Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.Collection: Faith
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not know any way to explain why God's grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it.
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible.
A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.
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.
A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.
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.
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.
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.
I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.
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.
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.
The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
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.
Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.
The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.
In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.Collection: Class
The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.Collection: Degrees
Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.Collection: Guilt
Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.Collection: Reflection
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.Collection: Reading
... 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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Men
A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memoryCollection: Memories
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.Collection: Men
A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.Collection: Men
True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.Collection: Wisdom
[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.Collection: Sides
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Freedom
Man without mysticism is a monster.Collection: Men
Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Views
Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Hands
Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.Collection: Mind
The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.Collection: West