Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
Columnist
Composer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Music Critic
Music Historian
Music Journalist
Novelist
Record Producer
Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Time
Sort
Passages
Called
Finally
Written
Guess
Speak
York
Left
Number
Rites
Book
Took
Rite
Come
Boys
Passage
Years
Numbers
Boston

More quotes by Nat Hentoff

Image
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
Image
The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.
Nat Hentoff
Image
The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
Nat Hentoff
Image
[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
Nat Hentoff
Image
Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.
Nat Hentoff
Image
Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt . A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.
Nat Hentoff
Image
[Left] are very hesitant to criticize [Barack] Obama, but that is beginning to change.
Nat Hentoff
Image
Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].
Nat Hentoff
Image
I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School.
Nat Hentoff
Image
I think at least two of [my kids] - and I'm - I better not speak them by name because I'm not sure where they are these days, but at least two of them believe in some kind of higher force. The - another is an atheist and the other is still pondering.
Nat Hentoff
Image
A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We live in the village. We have a summer place in Westport, Connecticut. We don't spend a lot on all kinds of things. But I have no complaints.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
[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