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My - mine is based on the fact that Bill Clinton has done - and I'm - this sounds like hyperbole, but he has done more harm to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than any president since John Adams.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
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More quotes by Nat Hentoff

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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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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Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.
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[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].
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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[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
Nat Hentoff
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[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
Nat Hentoff
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Malcolm X made it very clear that if somebody goes after you - whether it's cops or not - you have to defend yourself. But he was not an advocate for violence the way the Black Panthers were.
Nat Hentoff
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If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.
Nat Hentoff
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A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
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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I was in the back of the book [in the The Reporter] doing music.
Nat Hentoff
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I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
Nat Hentoff
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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 whole politically correct movement, if it - if that's what it is, was spawned by liberals. So I try to avoid categorizing myself.
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.
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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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
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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