Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.
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.
The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.
The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
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.
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.
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.
Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.
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.
A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.
A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something.
Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.
A nation’s life is about as long as its reverential memory.
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.
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.
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.
Man without mysticism is a monster.
The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.