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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

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
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Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
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More quotes by Nat Hentoff

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[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.
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Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of [Barack] Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their deity.
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At least they [people] showed the world we could elect a black president.
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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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I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.
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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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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.
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The main jobs would be The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and - I'm thinking of The Reporter when Max Askeli was there, but I got fired from The Reporter.
Nat Hentoff
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Great pressure was put on the editor, David Schneiderman, to not run the strip [of Jules Feiffer]. It was offensive. It was racist. And nobody apparently read the strip and saw what it was about. And I wrote a column about that.
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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We need to keep trying to rescue the Constitution from the President.
Nat Hentoff
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Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
Nat Hentoff
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Every life is different being pro-life is not only about saving the fetus, being pro-life is about all the stages of life.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time.
Nat Hentoff
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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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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.
Nat Hentoff
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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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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
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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