Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.
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.
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.
Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.
True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
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.
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.
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.
In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.
Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible.
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.
I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.
I do not know any way to explain why God’s grace touches a man who seems unworthy of it.