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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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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
Columnist
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Historian
Journalist
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Boston
Massachusetts
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Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
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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.
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Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.
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[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].
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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.
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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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[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.
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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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Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.
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I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally - and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles.
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I am against anybody who uses violence to make their points.
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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.
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I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
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Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.
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They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.
Nat Hentoff