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

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
Reverential
Memory
Nation
Memories
Nations
Long
Life

More quotes by Whittaker Chambers

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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.
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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In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
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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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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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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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.
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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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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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.
Whittaker Chambers
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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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The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.
Whittaker Chambers
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Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.
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
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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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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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The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
Whittaker Chambers
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Man without mysticism is a monster.
Whittaker Chambers
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Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.
Whittaker Chambers
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Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.
Whittaker Chambers