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What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
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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Historian
Journalist
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Music Historian
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Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Surveillance
Society
America
More quotes by Nat Hentoff
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
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.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
A liberal was somebody who expected and hoped that government would help the poor - you know, that whole routine. I did not know then and I've learned since that in an area that means a lot to me, free speech, liberals are as bad as many conservatives in trying to censor speech.
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
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
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.
Nat Hentoff
My parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.
Nat Hentoff
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
When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.
Nat Hentoff
The media ignores what is really going on.
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
In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.
Nat Hentoff
This book, Speaking Freely, starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X.
Nat Hentoff
Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].
Nat Hentoff
Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
Nat Hentoff
[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
Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.
Nat Hentoff
I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.
Nat Hentoff
[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.
Nat Hentoff
