Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers, was an American writer and editor. After his early years as a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he renounced communism, became an outspoken opponent, and testified at Alger Hiss's perjury and espionage trial. He described both events in his book Witness, published in 1952...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth1 April 1901
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts.
Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.
The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
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.
When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.
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.
[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.
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.
Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom. Necessity is the only ultimate justification known to the mind.
Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. 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.
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.
True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.