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Americans have only the dimmest notion of what their constitutional freedoms are - and what it took to get them...[and] the willingness to surrender what we're supposed to be fighting for is a recurring part of our history.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
Columnist
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Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Music Critic
Music Historian
Music Journalist
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Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Americans
Took
Recurring
Fighting
Freedoms
History
Constitutional
Part
Willingness
Surrender
Notion
Supposed

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I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.
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A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
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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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A particular moment - and I'm not, to this day, quite sure how I feel about it - I had always wanted to be in the law books - you know, Hentoff vs. something or other.
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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.
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I felt better about myself that I did it [calling Max Askeli Commander Askeli], rather than have - rather than thinking it and not writing it for being afraid of what might happen to me.
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There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.
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What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].
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Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
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We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.
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I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
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[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.
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[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].
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The irony is that [Barack] Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.
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[My wife] has some investments and stuff.
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In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.
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I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression - one of those brass clocks that didn't work - but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal.
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The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
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You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.
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