Quotes from Whittaker Chambers

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

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.

In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.

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

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

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

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

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

men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.

At the same time, I felt a surging release and a sense of freedom, like a man who bursts at last gasp out of a drowning sea.

I decided that five main points were essential to my break: 1) a weapon; 2) a hiding place; 3) an automobile for swift movement; 4) an identity, an official record of the fact that a man named Chambers had worked in Washington in the years 1937 and 1938; 5) a life preserver, in the form of copies of official documents stolen by the apparatus, which, should the party move against my life, I might have an outside chance of using as a dissuader.

That was the horror of the Purge—that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil.