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I wish [my wife] would [work] because - especially now the kind of - I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that - nobody else around has now.

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
Kind
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Would
Word
Ferocity
Wish
Writes
Else
Clarity
Around
Hardly
Mean
Honesty
Writing
Especially
Work
Nobody

More quotes by Nat Hentoff

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I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.
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[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
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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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You see that in his foreign policy [Barack] Obama lacks a backbone - both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone.
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[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].
Nat Hentoff
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After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press conferences that `Bill Shawn will stay here as long as he wants to be here.' Well, he wanted to be here until he died, but he wasn't allowed to.
Nat Hentoff
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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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[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.
Nat Hentoff
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The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.
Nat Hentoff
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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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We need to keep trying to rescue the Constitution from the President.
Nat Hentoff
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If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.
Nat Hentoff
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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.'
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time.
Nat Hentoff
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I'd pick - my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
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
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My contact with [Cato] was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.
Nat Hentoff
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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