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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
Composer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Music Critic
Music Historian
Music Journalist
Novelist
Record Producer
Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Supposed
Americans
Took
Recurring
Fighting
Freedoms
History
Constitutional
Part
Willingness
Surrender
Notion

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My father had always been a traveling salesman - New England, the South, whatever.
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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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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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There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.
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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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[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.
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[Bill Clinton] has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.
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I am against anybody who uses violence to make their points.
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I got Joan Baez to talk and Alan Ginsberg and some of the guys in the band. And by the end of the piece, another emissary came and said, `Bob [Dylan] is willing to speak to you now.' And I said with great pleasure, `No, thanks. The piece is over.'
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I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.
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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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He - A.J.[Muste] never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever heard of it.
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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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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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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
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I'd pick - my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time.
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The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
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Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.
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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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