Whittaker Chambers: Timing

Whittaker Chambers was Defected Communist spy. Explore interesting quotes on timing.
Whittaker Chambers: 66 quotes1 like

“[Stalin's] purge caused me to examine the meaning of Communism…. I had always known of course that there were books critical of Communism…. I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them….. the first book I read… was called I Speak for the Silent [by] Professor Vladimir Tchernavin…. He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good…. Suddenly for no reason at all he was arrested and carried away by the secret police…. Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed…. I said ‘this is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.’ … If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos? …. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul….”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), pp. 79-83

“Then he asked in German (the only language that we ever spoke): "Ist die Sowjetregierung eine faschistische Regierung? - Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?"… I sat silent for some moments. Then I said: "Ja, die Sowjetregierung ist eine faschistische Regierung - the Soviet Government is a fascist government"… Krivitsky turned for the first time and looked at me directly. "Du hast recht," he said, "und Kronstadt war der Wendepunkt”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

You are right, and Kronstadt was the turning point." (pp. 459-460)
Witness (1952)

“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.”

Whittaker Chambers

"The Old Deal," October 22, 1945
TIME magazine (1939-1948)

“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.”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 798

“No one mentioned Communism or the Hiss Case until we sat over our coffee in the living room. Mrs. Philip Jessup had just used her personal good offices to try to get me off TIME. Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. "By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave," he said, "the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?" "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 Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p.616

“The last war simplified the balance of political forces in the world by reducing them to two. For the first time, it made the power of the Communist sector of mankind (embodied in the Soviet Union) roughly equal to the power of the free sector of mankind (embodied in the United States). It made the collision of these powers all but inevitable. For the world wars did not end the crisis. They raised its tensions to a new pitch. They raised the crisis to a new stage. All the politics of our time, including the politics of war, will be the politics of this crisis.”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 7

“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."”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 25