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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.

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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Boston
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Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
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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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Malcolm X made it very clear that if somebody goes after you - whether it's cops or not - you have to defend yourself. But he was not an advocate for violence the way the Black Panthers were.
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Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.
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I read like everybody - like every other writer.
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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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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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When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.
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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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When I approached one of his secretaries for an interview, I was told that Bob [Dylan] didn't want to see me anymore because of what my wife Margot [Hentoff] had written.
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We need to keep trying to rescue the Constitution from the President.
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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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The second wife [Trudi Bernstein] - the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years.
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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.
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The immigration bill - the new immigration bill - [Bill Clinton] has stripped the courts, which Congress can do under the leadership of the president, so that people who had a right to asylum or to petition - for asylum who were legal residents are now unable to go through because that part of the bill has been taken out.
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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.
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We live in the village. We have a summer place in Westport, Connecticut. We don't spend a lot on all kinds of things. But I have no complaints.
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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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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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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.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff