Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Nat Hentoff

Image
Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of [Barack] Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their deity.
Nat Hentoff
Image
Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.
Nat Hentoff
Image
The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
[My father] was very impressed when he saw Death of a Salesman, I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
[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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
I got Joan Baez to talk and Alan Ginsberg and some of the guys in the band. And by the end of the piece, another emissary came and said, `Bob [Dylan] is willing to speak to you now.' And I said with great pleasure, `No, thanks. The piece is over.'
Nat Hentoff
Image
The second wife [Trudi Bernstein] - the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years.
Nat Hentoff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].
Nat Hentoff
Image
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.
Nat Hentoff
Image
[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.
Nat Hentoff
Image
I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
Nat Hentoff
Image
Great pressure was put on the editor, David Schneiderman, to not run the strip [of Jules Feiffer]. It was offensive. It was racist. And nobody apparently read the strip and saw what it was about. And I wrote a column about that.
Nat Hentoff