Nat Hentoff Quotes
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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.
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We hear talk now about reforming public education. There are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic illiteracy in the country.
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I've never met anybody quite like Bill Shawn. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.
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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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I was in the back of the book in the The Reporter doing music.
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My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.
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In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia.
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I live in the Village right near NYU, which is taking over most of the Village. I've lived there for most of my time in New York. One of the things I like about the Village is, it's considered the kind of area where you can't have skyscrapers or, actually, many tall buildings. So you can see the sky which, I think, is a benefit.
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I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Clay Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.
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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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The most recent example and the most, I think, appalling example was when Martin Peretz, the owner - and I stress owner - of The New Republic fired a journalist who I think was uncommonly skilled and full of integrity and passion and all that stuff. But he had criticized regularly the former pupil and friend of Martin Peretz, Al Gore, so he was fired. That's contrarianist that went around - that did - that was not rewarded.
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However, I never thought that George W. Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil."
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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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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. Bill Shawn knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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My wife Margot was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager of The Jazz Review, and we got to know each other and we married.
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This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the Barack Obama administration are not believable.
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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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Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.
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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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The immigration bill - the new immigration bill - Bill Clinton has stripped the courts, which Congress can do under the leadership of the president, so that people who had a right to asylum or to petition - for asylum who were legal residents are now unable to go through because that part of the bill has been taken out.
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I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression - one of those brass clocks that didn't work - but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal.
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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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I'm working on "Living the Bill of Rights," and it's about people - well, it starts with Brennan and Douglas as people who not only live the Bill of Rights, but try to shape the reason for that.
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George W. Bush was led astray and we were led astray.