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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

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
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The main jobs would be The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and - I'm thinking of The Reporter when Max Askeli was there, but I got fired from The Reporter.
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[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
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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.
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We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.
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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.
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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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Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.
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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.
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My father had always been a traveling salesman - New England, the South, whatever.
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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
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Why has slamming a ball with a racquet become so obsessive a pleasure for so many of us? It seems clear to me that a primary attraction of the sport is the opportunity it gives to release aggression physically without being arrested for felonious assault.
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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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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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[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.
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The irony is that [Barack] Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.
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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.
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I'd pick - my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time.
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A good many people voted for [Barack] Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country.
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What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
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