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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.

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
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Music Historian
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Boston
Massachusetts
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Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
Never
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Religion

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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.
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I don't like to feel intimidated by where I make a living.
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I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School.
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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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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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The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
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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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I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.
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[My wife] has some investments and stuff.
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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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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 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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[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.
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In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.
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There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.
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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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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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Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.
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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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