Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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….

A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is dirt nice? Is death nice? Above all is dying nice? And, in the end, we must ask, is God nice? I doubt it.

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.

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

It was expressed in a profound sense that labor in itself is one of the highest goods, in a profound suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure as an end in life, amounting to an antipathy and merging with a deep distaste, and distrust of materialism in its commonest forms of success and comfort. It is not at all chance that both the Chamberses and the Hisses, arriving over very different routes, should at last have found their way into the community of Quakers.

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

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

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.

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