Whittaker Chambers Quotes


I left Nixon, feeling ... like a very small creature, skirting the shadows of encircling powers that would not hesitate to crush me as impersonally as a steam roller crushes a bug.


Context

Chambers was Congressman Richard Nixon's star witness in the case against Alger Hiss:


Citations

Whittaker Chambers, 1901-1961, Editor, Time, Witness, Random House, 1952

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

This speech was officially prepared and read to the six Indian tribes of the Iroquois Nation. The purpose was to persuade the Iroquois Indians to stay neutral (see {583726}) in the coming conflict with England. The Iroquois had traditionally traded peaceably with the colonists and on many occasions the colonists and the Iroquois had fought against the French and other Indians. Unfortunately, a Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, had traveled to England and been educated there. He, following the conventional wisdom of the day persuaded most of the Iroquois tribes to join the obvious winner—England—and fight on their side. Only the Oneida tribe resisted Brant’s advice, and joined the revolutionists. The result was a civil, fratricidal war of not only white, but also the Iroquois Indians who had been at peace with each other since any could remember. When the colonists won, the Oneida were warmly embraced and participated in New York and other colonial life and activities. The relationship was so good that a little over 200 years later the average earnings of the Indian in New York State exceeded that of the average white man. The other 5 Iroquois tribes however were attacked and driven out of their traditional territories and they fled with Joseph Brant to English Canada where they have not yet fully recovered their important place in the society.


Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
  • Born: April 1, 1901
  • Died: July 9, 1961
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Journalist, Writer, Spy, Poet, Translator

Whittaker Chambers was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), defected from the Soviet underground (1938), worked for Time magazine (1939–1948), and then testified about the Ware group in what became the Hiss case for perjury (1949–1950), often referred to as the trial of the century, all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review (1957–1959). US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.