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In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.

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
Impossible
Like
Lazarus
Impossibility
Began
Return

More quotes by 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.
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In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
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Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.
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Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.
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Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.
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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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The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
Whittaker Chambers
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Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.
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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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... 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.
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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