Quote

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.

Whittaker Chambers

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Whittaker Chambers
Age: 60 †
Born: 1901
Born: April 1
Died: 1961
Died: July 9
Editor
Journalist
Spy
Translator
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Intelligence
Softening
General
Consequent
Liberty
Fiber
Pleasure
Widely
Happiness
Automatically
Freedom
Tends
Spirit
Replaced
Ends
Pursuit
Fibers

More quotes by Whittaker Chambers

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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.
Whittaker Chambers
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Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.
Whittaker Chambers
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True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
Whittaker Chambers
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Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.
Whittaker Chambers
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A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.
Whittaker Chambers
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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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... 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.
Whittaker Chambers
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Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.
Whittaker Chambers
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The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
Whittaker Chambers
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The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.
Whittaker Chambers
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The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.
Whittaker Chambers
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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.
Whittaker Chambers
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A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory
Whittaker Chambers
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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.
Whittaker Chambers
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The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
Whittaker Chambers
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For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.
Whittaker Chambers