Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.
Nat Hentoff
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Happenings
Happening
Constitution
Dangerous
People
More quotes by Nat Hentoff
A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
Nat Hentoff
I don't like to feel intimidated by where I make a living.
Nat Hentoff
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
Great pressure was put on the editor, David Schneiderman, to not run the strip [of Jules Feiffer]. It was offensive. It was racist. And nobody apparently read the strip and saw what it was about. And I wrote a column about that.
Nat Hentoff
Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of [Barack] Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their deity.
Nat Hentoff
[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
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
What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
Nat Hentoff
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
[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.
Nat Hentoff
When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.
Nat Hentoff
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.
Nat Hentoff
At least they [people] showed the world we could elect a black president.
Nat Hentoff
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
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
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.
Nat Hentoff
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
I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
Nat Hentoff
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
