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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
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Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Perfect
Pacifist
Thought
Stomach
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Hard
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Muste
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Margot

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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 think at least two of [my kids] - and I'm - I better not speak them by name because I'm not sure where they are these days, but at least two of them believe in some kind of higher force. The - another is an atheist and the other is still pondering.
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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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As Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.'
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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.
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The people I admire are those who keep on producing and working and going on.
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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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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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I really envy, in some respects, some of the people of faith I've known - A.J.[Muste], for example.
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The second wife [Trudi Bernstein] - the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years.
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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.
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That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
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[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
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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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I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.
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I felt better about myself that I did it [calling Max Askeli Commander Askeli], rather than have - rather than thinking it and not writing it for being afraid of what might happen to me.
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[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
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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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The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
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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.
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