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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 Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 Communist vision is the vision of man without God.
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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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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I do not know any way to explain why God's grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it.
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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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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In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
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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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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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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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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Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.
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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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