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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.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
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Boston
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Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
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More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
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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've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.
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I am against anybody who uses violence to make their points.
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I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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Malcolm X made it very clear that if somebody goes after you - whether it's cops or not - you have to defend yourself. But he was not an advocate for violence the way the Black Panthers were.
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[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.
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I had written a book called Boston Boy some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. That book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me.
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The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.
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.
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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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[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.
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I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff