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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
Novelist
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Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Americans
Took
Recurring
Fighting
Freedoms
History
Constitutional
Part
Willingness
Surrender
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Supposed

More quotes by Nat Hentoff

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What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
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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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[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
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I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's Life of Christ.
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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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The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.
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[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
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I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
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Bob Dylan was uncomfortable being known as just a protest singer. He wanted to go back into himself and do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.
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Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].
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At least they [people] showed the world we could elect a black president.
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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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I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.
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There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.
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The [George W.] Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued.[Barack] Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.
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If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.
Nat Hentoff
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I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally - and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles.
Nat Hentoff
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[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.
Nat Hentoff