Whittaker Chambers Quotes

[Stalin's] purge caused me to examine the meaning of Communism.... I had always known of course that there were books critical of Communism.... I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them..... the first book I read... was called I Speak for the Silent [by] Professor Vladimir Tchernavin.... He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good.... Suddenly for no reason at all he was arrested and carried away by the secret police.... Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed.... I said ‘this is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.’ ... If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos? .... The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul.... (pp. 79-83)

The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself. (p. 315)

Then he asked in German (the only language that we ever spoke): "Ist die Sowjetregierung eine faschistische Regierung? - Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?"… I sat silent for some moments. Then I said: "Ja, die Sowjetregierung ist eine faschistische Regierung - the Soviet Government is a fascist government"… Krivitsky turned for the first time and looked at me directly. "Du hast recht," he said, "und Kronstadt war der Wendepunkt - You are right, and Kronstadt was the turning point." (pp. 459-460)

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)

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)

Fascism began with the first trade union and the first cartel… Meanwhile, the Left developed its own form of cartelization—syndicalism, chiefly under the theoretical inspiration of the French engineer, George Sorel, whose hardboiled Reflections on Violence was so much appealing to our youth than the ponderosities of Das Kapital. For Sorel not only had the knife between his teeth; he accepted the more sweeping Marxist ideas too—class war, seizure of the instruments of production by the workers, the expropriation of anybody who owns anything. (p. 95)

All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. ("Night Thoughts," May 8, 1939)