Nat Hentoff Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I have a lot of breast cancer history on my mother's side of the family.
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History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
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Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
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In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes.
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There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
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I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.
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For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats.
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The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.
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But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation's history.
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Indeed, throughout much of history and in many cultures, redheads have been viewed with suspicion and fear - and even killed - because of their hair.
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
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The study of history empowers nations and individuals with an ability to avoid errors of the past and lay foundations for victories in the future.
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You need to know when to surrender the album.
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I get in trouble when I say things like, 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.
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I never hated hip-hop. It became the new rock and roll. It became the biggest thing that Africans have ever done in the history of the Americas. Hip-hop put more black Americans on than anything before it. It fed more people. It allowed them to diversify into clothing lines and billion-dollar headphone companies.
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In terms of writing about horses, I fell backwards into that. I was intent on getting a Ph.D., becoming a professor, and writing on history but I got sick 14 years ago when I was 19. Getting sick derailed that plan completely.
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I am a failed architect, if I'm honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I've got really bad spatial awareness.
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I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.
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We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about.
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I don't mind that Bill Gates is a mega zillionaire; he's done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, e.g. the inventor of Hungarian notation, probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field.
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Women are allowed to exist in this very narrow lane, but as soon as you step out of that lane, people want to stone you.
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You can eat an omelet at midnight, at lunchtime, all day long. It's perfect for every occasion.
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I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
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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.
