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I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.

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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Essayist
Historian
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Music Historian
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Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Always
Never
Trapeze
Performer
Performers
Lawyer
Certainly
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More quotes by Nat Hentoff

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I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.
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Every life is different being pro-life is not only about saving the fetus, being pro-life is about all the stages of life.
Nat Hentoff
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What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].
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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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The need for education for the individual student should be recognized... home, neighborhood. But instead of that, we have the future being determined by standardized testing.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.
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.
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[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
Nat Hentoff
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Abortion happens because of economic circumstances.
Nat Hentoff
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Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
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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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
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I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.
Nat Hentoff
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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
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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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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
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A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.
Nat Hentoff
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I'd pick - my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff