Nat Hentoff Quotes
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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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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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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. Bill Shawn knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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I was less angry at Carl Armstrong, though I was angry at the people who came to his trial: Dan Ellsberg, who ordinarily I respected a lot; Philip Berrigan; the guy who teaches at Princeton still - I can't remember his name. And they were saying - well, they were saying, really, what Arthur Koestler had people saying on "Darkness at Noon." The means were unfortunate and, sadly, someone died, but the end is what is important and this was a great symbolic - something or other - sign against the war in Vietnam.
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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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The death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be the Health Czar. Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote a book about health care, which influenced President Barack Obama.
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Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.
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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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Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.
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Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.
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We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time.
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I met my wife Margot on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
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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 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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In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia.
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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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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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The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Barack Obama has done nothing about that.
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Bill Clinton has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.
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Barack Obama is a man who is causing us and will cause us a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally.
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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.
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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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My chronology is terrible. Work with William Shawn must have some ago. It was after he was fired by Newhouse. After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press.
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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.