Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Whittaker Chambers
Age: 60 †
Born: 1901
Born: April 1
Died: 1961
Died: July 9
Editor
Journalist
Spy
Translator
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Look
Likely
Shield
Nothing
Answer
Shields
Looks
Answers
Mighty
Much
Taught
Seldom
Men
Woman
Covered
Utters
Life
Experience
Innocence
Blameless
Like
Doe
Tone
Calmly
Find
Guilt
Outraged

More quotes by Whittaker Chambers

Image
The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
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
Image
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
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
Image
A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
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
Image
Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory
Whittaker Chambers
Image
The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.
Whittaker Chambers
Image
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
Image
Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.
Whittaker Chambers