Best 195 quotes of Nat Hentoff on MyQuotes

Nat Hentoff

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    Nat Hentoff

    Abortion happens because of economic circumstances.

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    Nat Hentoff

    After [Bill Shawn] was fired, I was going to the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association] on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.I went into a coffee shop to get a piece of pie and a coffee, and I was reading a paper and I hear a voice. And it was -it was not a voice I was familiar with, but I looked across the table and I saw Lilian Ross.And sitting next to her was William Shawn - no tie, needed a shave. His voice was kind of coarse and rather loud. He wasn't drunk, but I was just stunned.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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.

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    Nat Hentoff

    A good many people voted for [Barack] Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country.

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    Nat Hentoff

    A.J.[Muste] died in the late '60s, I think. He was 81, something like that.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [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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    Nat Hentoff

    A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [A.J. Muste] was from Michigan and he grew up in the Dutch Reform Church there, which is a fairly strict church. He later came to New York. He was the minister of a labor temple in the - on the East Side. Then he founded, to my knowledge, the first, maybe the only, labor school; that is, Cornell has a labor department and other schools. But this was a school for - entirely for labor organizers, and he was the - the chairman.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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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    Nat Hentoff

    Allen Ginsberg was a remarkable guy. He was himself. He was an original.

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    Nat Hentoff

    A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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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    Nat Hentoff

    An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way [Barack] Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon".

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    Nat Hentoff

    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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    Nat Hentoff

    As usual, the people who are poorest - the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people - are going to suffer more than anyone else under the [Barack] Obama administration.

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    Nat Hentoff

    At the time there was a hospital strike in New York and the Catholic hospitals were part of a general consortium, and the head of the consortium had decided that they were finally going to replace some of the striking workers. And I hear [John] O'Connor yelling, `Over my dead body will you replace any of those workers! They have a right to strike.' So I figured, `This is interesting.'

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    Nat Hentoff

    A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Barack Obama's ] only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Being pro-life is a basic perspective of everything I do.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Bill Clinton] has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Bill Clinton] was the man, as a matter of fact, who, in terms of the Communications Decency Act, which would have made the Internet, the whole concept of cyberspace, vulnerable to rampant censorship - he pushed that bill, and I know the man in the Justice Department whom he persuaded - the guy didn't want to lose his job - to write the bill.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Bob Dylan was really mad with my wife. I had asked by Rolling Stone - the only assignment I ever had for them - to do a story on the Rolling Thunder Review, which was Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg, Joan Baez and a host of stars. My wife, some weeks before, had written in The New York Times that The Kid wasn't The Kid anymore and he wasn't all that winning anymore.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Bob Dylan was uncomfortable being known as just a protest singer.  He wanted to go back into himself and do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.

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    Nat Hentoff

    [Cardinal John O'Connor] had [my wife] Margot and me over for drinks a couple of times. That was something I never could have envisioned back when I was a kid in Boston, that a cardinal and I would be, if not breaking bread, at least breaking Scotch.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Clay Felker was then - he had - to his credit, he had created New York Magazine, which was the first of the city magazines that covered the city and gave all kinds of advice and all that sort of stuff. And there were copies all over the country by the time he left. He had, however, a view of journalism that was very much, I must say, like Tina Brown's at The New Yorker. You hit 'em hard, fast, give 'em something to talk about the day after the paper comes out, as contrasted with William Shawn, who gave them something to talk about two or three years from then.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Congressman [Richard ] Icord headed a House on American activities committee. It was called the House Internal Security Committee. And he put out a report, and he named a number of very destructive people who lectured at colleges and left arson in their wake and did other terrible things. And he mentioned me and he ascribed to me three organizations to which I'd never belonged, and I decided I would do something about this.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].

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    Nat Hentoff

    Duke Ellington had a song, "What Am I Here For?" - this is what being pro-life is.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt . A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Every life is different; being pro-life is not only about saving the fetus, being pro-life is about all the stages of life.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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.

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    Nat Hentoff

    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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    Nat Hentoff

    He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this [ invasions of privacy ]. So all in all, [Barack] Obama is a disaster.

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    Nat Hentoff

    Here is a guy who's supposed to be the Genghis Khan of the church, the pro-choice people hate him, and I don't know about his labor background so I figured there must be more to him, and there is. I wrote a book about [John Cardinal O'Connor].

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    Nat Hentoff

    I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.

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    Nat Hentoff

    I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people.

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    Nat Hentoff

    I am hesitant to say this about [Barack] Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution.