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You see that in his foreign policy [Barack] Obama lacks a backbone - both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone.
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
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Foreign
Obama
Policy
Personal
Backbone
Lacks
Constitutional
More quotes by Nat Hentoff
My contact with [Cato] was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.
Nat Hentoff
[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
Nat Hentoff
I'd pick - my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time.
Nat Hentoff
As Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.'
Nat Hentoff
I say personally because I am 84 years old, and [Barack Obama's] is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
Nat Hentoff
[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
Nat Hentoff
I wish [my wife] would [work] because - especially now the kind of - I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that - nobody else around has now.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press conferences that `Bill Shawn will stay here as long as he wants to be here.' Well, he wanted to be here until he died, but he wasn't allowed to.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
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].
Nat Hentoff
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
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.
Nat Hentoff
I think at least two of [my kids] - and I'm - I better not speak them by name because I'm not sure where they are these days, but at least two of them believe in some kind of higher force. The - another is an atheist and the other is still pondering.
Nat Hentoff
