Whittaker Chambers

“The Wizard of Oz (M. G. M.) should settle an old Hollywood controversy: whether fantasy can be presented on the screen as successfully with human actors as with cartoons. ("The New Pictures," August 21, 1939)”

“All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. ("Night Thoughts," May 8, 1939)”

“When the train of history makes a sharp turn, said Lenin, the passengers who do not have a good grip on their seats are thrown off. Last week the Communist Limited had just about completed the dizzy turn from the Communazi Pact to the Battle of Britain, and U. S. literary liberals were spattered all over the right of way. ("Revolt of the Intellectuals," January 6, 1941)”

“The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. ("Brightest in Dungeons," May 26, 1941)”

“"What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!" ("The Ghosts on the Roof," March 5, 1945)”

“Once upon a time, when the Yewnited States was just a little shaver among the nations, but already very spoiled along the literate Eastern fringes, there lived younder in Tennessee a lovable old man with a tongue like a rat-tailed file and a face so hard they called him Old Hickory. ("The Old Deal," October 22, 1945)”

“Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people — probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews. ("In Egypt Land," December 30, 1946)”

“In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas. ("The Circles of Perdition," December 8, 1947)”

“Reinhold Niebuhr's new orthodoxy is the oldtime religion put through the intellectual wringer. It is a re-examination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism and the idea of progress.”

“Two faiths were on trial . Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies... At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. (p. 4)”

“Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. (pp. 4-5)”

“A man is not primarily a witness against something. (p. 5)”

“My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "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." (p. 16)”

“In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men. (p. 25)”

“I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: "You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world." (p. 25)”

“He was a Southerner with the fine abandon some Southerners have about firearms and related matters. "Well, sir," he said with immense pleasure, "you've bought the right gun. Just hold it in front of you, squeeze the trigger, and, brother, it will be fay-ya-you-well." (p. 58)”

“Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: "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." (p. 25)”

“I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary. (p. 456)”

“The Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people - not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in. (p. 798)”

“A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory. (p. 40)”

“The Columbia faculty was not, of course, composed wholly of young skeptics and esthetes. By any count of academic noses, they were a small minority. (p. 119)”

“Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian. (p. 186)”

“Die goldene Medina. The accent was not on the golden (except in the sense of some mysterious Light), but on the Medina - that is, the city of hope, the city of deliverance. (p. 281)”

“The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself. (p. 315)”

“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. (p. 52)”

“Now, the Communists recognized at once (or, more probably, after they had stirred things up a bit) that Senator McCarthy is a political godsend. (p. 57)”

“Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism. (p. 229)”

“Lenin was a Great Russian peasant . Oh yes, he was a dialectician, the only true one among them. But most of all he was a Russian and that is to be a peasant. (p. 274)”