Whittaker Chambers Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“... 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 -
“True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.”
-- 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 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 satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.”
-- Whittaker Chambers -
“Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.”
-- Whittaker Chambers -
“In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.”
-- 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 -
“I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.”
-- 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 -
“A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory”
-- 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
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