Whittaker Chambers Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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 Wizard of Oz (M. G. M.) should settle an old Hollywood controversy: whether fantasy can be presented on the screen as successfully with human actors as with cartoons.

Whittaker Chambers
Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism.

Whittaker Chambers
He was a Southerner with the fine abandon some Southerners have about firearms and related matters. "Well, sir," he said with immense pleasure, "you've bought the right gun. Just hold it in front of you, squeeze the trigger, and, brother, it will be fay-ya-you-well."

Whittaker Chambers
Reinhold Niebuhr's new orthodoxy is the oldtime religion put through the intellectual wringer. It is a re-examination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism and the idea of progress.

Whittaker Chambers
Then he asked in German (the only language that we ever spoke): "Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?"… I sat silent for some moments. Then I said: "the Soviet Government is a fascist government"… Krivitsky turned for the first time and looked at me directly. "You are right," he said, "and Kronstadt was the turning point.

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

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

Whittaker Chambers
The last war simplified the balance of political forces in the world by reducing them to two. For the first time, it made the power of the Communist sector of mankind (embodied in the Soviet Union) roughly equal to the power of the free sector of mankind (embodied in the United States). It made the collision of these powers all but inevitable. For the world wars did not end the crisis. They raised its tensions to a new pitch. They raised the crisis to a new stage. All the politics of our time, including the politics of war, will be the politics of this crisis.

Whittaker Chambers
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men.

Whittaker Chambers
I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary.

Whittaker Chambers
The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives or revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.

Whittaker Chambers
In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

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

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
Now, the Communists recognized at once (or, more probably, after they had stirred things up a bit) that Senator McCarthy is a political godsend.

Whittaker Chambers