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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

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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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I read like everybody - like every other writer.
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I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.
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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 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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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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Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.
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Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.
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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 second wife [Trudi Bernstein] - the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years.
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[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.
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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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That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
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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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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.
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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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Bob Dylan was uncomfortable being known as just a protest singer. He wanted to go back into himself and do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.
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[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.
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There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.
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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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I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.
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