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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.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
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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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I'd pick - my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time.
Nat Hentoff
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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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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.'
Nat Hentoff
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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
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Miranda [Hentoff] is a complete musician. She's a composer, a singer. She writes scripts along - with her projects. And she's a superb teacher. Her teaching pupils have ranged from Itzhak Perlman to Sting.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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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 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.
Nat Hentoff
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That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called The Second American Revolution about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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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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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
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He - A.J.[Muste] never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever heard of it.
Nat Hentoff
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At least they [people] showed the world we could elect a black president.
Nat Hentoff
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[A.J. Muste] never engaged in violence but he believed, as [Mahatma] Gandhi did - and he knew Gandhi slightly - he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community.
Nat Hentoff
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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
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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
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When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.
Nat Hentoff
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[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.
Nat Hentoff
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One of the worst elements of Obama's career, which no one talks about, is that he voted twice for a bill that said, if there is a botched abortion, if the child emerges from the womb alive, it should be okay to kill the baby. We have elected a president - twice! - who agrees with infanticide.
Nat Hentoff