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[A.J. Muste] never engaged in violence but he believed, as [Mahatma] Gandhi did - and he knew Gandhi slightly - he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community.

Nat Hentoff

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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
Never
Gandhi
Slightly
Engaged
Believed
Active
Violence
Muste
Knew
Mahatma
Community
Pacifist

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I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's Life of Christ.
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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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I got Joan Baez to talk and Alan Ginsberg and some of the guys in the band. And by the end of the piece, another emissary came and said, `Bob [Dylan] is willing to speak to you now.' And I said with great pleasure, `No, thanks. The piece is over.'
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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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A liberal was somebody who expected and hoped that government would help the poor - you know, that whole routine. I did not know then and I've learned since that in an area that means a lot to me, free speech, liberals are as bad as many conservatives in trying to censor speech.
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The immigration bill - the new immigration bill - [Bill Clinton] has stripped the courts, which Congress can do under the leadership of the president, so that people who had a right to asylum or to petition - for asylum who were legal residents are now unable to go through because that part of the bill has been taken out.
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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.
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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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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.
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I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them.
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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[Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read Darkness at Noon.
Nat Hentoff
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I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
Nat Hentoff