Top 35 Whittaker Chambers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.”

— Whittaker Chambers

2. “Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.”

— Whittaker Chambers

3. “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.”

— Whittaker Chambers

4. “You don’t understand the class structure of American society,” said Smetana, “or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.”

— Whittaker Chambers

5. “In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.”

— Whittaker Chambers

6. “Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.”

— Whittaker Chambers

7. “Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible.”

— Whittaker Chambers

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8. “The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.”

— Whittaker Chambers

9. “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

10. “True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.”

— Whittaker Chambers

11. “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

12. “The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.”

— Whittaker Chambers

13. “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.”

— Whittaker Chambers

14. “Man without mysticism is a monster.”

— Whittaker Chambers

15. “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.”

— Whittaker Chambers

16. “The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.”

— Whittaker Chambers

17. “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

18. “A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.”

— Whittaker Chambers

19. “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.”

— Whittaker Chambers

20. “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

21. “I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.”

— Whittaker Chambers

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.”

— Whittaker Chambers

25. “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

26. “Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.”

— Whittaker Chambers

27. “I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism. I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: “The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.”

— Whittaker Chambers

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in Man.”

— Whittaker Chambers

31. “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

32. “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

33. “A nation’s life is about as long as its reverential memory.”

— Whittaker Chambers

34. “It was expressed in a profound sense that labor in itself is one of the highest goods, in a profound suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure as an end in life, amounting to an antipathy and merging with a deep distaste, and distrust of materialism in its commonest forms of success and comfort. It is not at all chance that both the Chamberses and the Hisses, arriving over very different routes, should at last have found their way into the community of Quakers.”

— Whittaker Chambers

35. “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.”

— Whittaker Chambers

36. “The next time I met Ulrich, he asked me: “Do you know what sookin sin is?” I.”

— Whittaker Chambers

37. “I do not know any way to explain why God’s grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it.”

— Whittaker Chambers

38. “The No. 1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. The No. 2 source in the same Department was Henry Julian Wadleigh, an expert in the Trade Agreements Division, to which he had managed to have himself transferred from the Agriculture Department. He had done so at the request of the Communist Party.”

— Whittaker Chambers

39. “The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.”

— Whittaker Chambers