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Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.

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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More quotes by 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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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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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.
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There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].
Nat Hentoff
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The people I admire are those who keep on producing and working and going on.
Nat Hentoff
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A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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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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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.
Nat Hentoff
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Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.
Nat Hentoff
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I guess you'd say, including the - what I just spoke about, the learning that liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
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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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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