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Why has slamming a ball with a racquet become so obsessive a pleasure for so many of us? It seems clear to me that a primary attraction of the sport is the opportunity it gives to release aggression physically without being arrested for felonious assault.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
Columnist
Composer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Music Critic
Music Historian
Music Journalist
Novelist
Record Producer
Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Pleasure
Attraction
Slamming
Clear
Tennis
Obsessive
Opportunity
Sport
Arrested
Become
Ball
Assault
Seems
Release
Aggression
Without
Balls
Physically
Many
Gives
Primaries
Giving
Sports
Primary
Felonious

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I don't think [Bill Clinton] does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.
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I had written a book called Boston Boy some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. That book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me.
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I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.
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My - mine is based on the fact that Bill Clinton has done - and I'm - this sounds like hyperbole, but he has done more harm to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than any president since John Adams.
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A good many people voted for [Barack] Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country.
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Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.
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I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them.
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Miranda [Hentoff] is a complete musician. She's a composer, a singer. She writes scripts along - with her projects. And she's a superb teacher. Her teaching pupils have ranged from Itzhak Perlman to Sting.
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However, I never thought that [George W.] Bush himself was, in any sense, evil.
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[Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read Darkness at Noon.
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I was in the back of the book [in the The Reporter] doing music.
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[My father] was very impressed when he saw Death of a Salesman, I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.
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I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.
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I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.
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[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.
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[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
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They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.
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The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.
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[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.
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[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.
Nat Hentoff