Nat Hentoff Quotes
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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 don't think Bill Clinton does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.
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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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You see that in his foreign policy Barack Obama lacks a backbone - both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone.
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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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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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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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In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia.
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I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn.
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That race is still part of what Barack Obama is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
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Bill Clinton has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.
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Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.
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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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I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old.
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The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
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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 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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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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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. Bill Shawn knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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This book, "Speaking Freely," starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X.
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I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people.
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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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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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Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.