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If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.

Nat Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
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More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.
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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 read like everybody - like every other writer.
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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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[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.
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The main jobs would be The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and - I'm thinking of The Reporter when Max Askeli was there, but I got fired from The Reporter.
Nat Hentoff
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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.
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One of the worst elements of Obama's career, which no one talks about, is that he voted twice for a bill that said, if there is a botched abortion, if the child emerges from the womb alive, it should be okay to kill the baby. We have elected a president - twice! - who agrees with infanticide.
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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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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
Nat Hentoff
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[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
Nat Hentoff
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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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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.
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[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
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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.
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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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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