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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.

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
Music Critic
Music Historian
Music Journalist
Novelist
Record Producer
Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Wife
Muste
Knew
Margot
Perfect
Pacifist
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Hard
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More quotes by 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.
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The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.
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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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I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.
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Miranda [Hentoff] is a complete musician. She's a composer, a singer. She writes scripts along - with her projects. And she's a superb teacher. Her teaching pupils have ranged from Itzhak Perlman to Sting.
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Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].
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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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[My wife Margot] was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager [of The Jazz Review], and we got to know each other and we married.
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He - A.J.[Muste] never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever heard of it.
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The [George W.] Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued.[Barack] Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.
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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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[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 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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[Bill Clinton] has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.
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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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[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.
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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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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.
Nat Hentoff
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You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.
Nat Hentoff