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

More quotes by 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.
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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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I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School.
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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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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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He - A.J.[Muste] never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever heard of it.
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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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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I guess you'd say, including the - what I just spoke about, the learning that liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be.
Nat Hentoff
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[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].
Nat Hentoff
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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.
Nat Hentoff
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What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
Nat Hentoff
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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.
Nat Hentoff
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When I approached one of his secretaries for an interview, I was told that Bob [Dylan] didn't want to see me anymore because of what my wife Margot [Hentoff] had written.
Nat Hentoff
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The whole politically correct movement, if it - if that's what it is, was spawned by liberals. So I try to avoid categorizing myself.
Nat Hentoff
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I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
Nat Hentoff
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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
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We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.
Nat Hentoff
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You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.
Nat Hentoff
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That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
Nat Hentoff