Whittaker Chambers Quotes

Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian. (p. 186)

I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: "You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world." (p. 25)

The Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people - not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in. (p. 798)

A man is not primarily a witness against something. (p. 5)

The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. ("Brightest in Dungeons," May 26, 1941)

A state is as sound as its thriftiest citizens. A social order is sick when it has to tax its thrifty citizen to provide for its poor. When a social order has no other choice but to so, that social order is doomed. The Anatomy of Fascism, The American Mercury, April 1944 (p. 94)

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory. (p. 40)

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. (pp. 4-5)

Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism. (p. 229)

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. (p. 52)

My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "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." (p. 16)

With the exception of Granville Hicks, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism. How should they know the Lenin was the first fascist and that they were cooperating with the party from which the Nazis had borrowed all their important methods and ideas?... After Stalin’s Purge, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Russia’s grab of half of Poland, the 1940 betrayed the full nature of Stalin’s hand with the attack on Finland, the seizure of part of Rumanian, and all of the Baltic States. Fellow travelers began to jump off the train. The Revolt of the Intellectuals., Time (p. 61)

Meanwhile the intellectuals, refugees once more in their lonely remodeled farmhouses in Connecticut and the Berkshires, thought it over. Comrade Hicks, who had been closest to the Party, knew most about it, thought Communism was daily growing more like fascism. (p. 61)

I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary. (p. 456)

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. ("The New Pictures," August 21, 1939)