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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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Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.
Nat Hentoff
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I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School.
Nat Hentoff
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[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.
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My father had always been a traveling salesman - New England, the South, whatever.
Nat Hentoff
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[Søren ] Kierkegaard said it for me a long time ago. He said, `You can't really think yourself into a faith, into a religion. It's something you have to make a leap into faith.' And I've never been able to do that. I wish I could. Then maybe I could believe in an afterlife.
Nat Hentoff
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Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.
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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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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I don't think [Bill Clinton] does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.
Nat Hentoff
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[My father] was very impressed when he saw Death of a Salesman, I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.
Nat Hentoff
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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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[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
Nat Hentoff
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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
Nat Hentoff
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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
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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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The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.
Nat Hentoff
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That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
Nat Hentoff
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I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
Nat Hentoff
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There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.
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