Nat Hentoff Quotes
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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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George W. Bush was led astray and we were led astray.
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I was in the back of the book in the The Reporter doing music.
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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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I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people.
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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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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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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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My wife has some investments and stuff.
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Duke Ellington had a song, "What Am I Here For?" - this is what being pro-life is.
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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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Bill Shawn had always been in The New Yorker immaculately dressed - quietly, immaculately dressed, very soft-spoken. On the phone I could hardly hear him sometimes.
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I have two boys. One, Nicholas, is a criminal defense attorney in Phoenix in which he - gets into - a lot of very controversial cases. He has sued Sheriff Arpaio, the famous sheriff who keeps people in tents, gives them green bologna and the like. My other son Tom is with Williams & Connolly in Washington, where he does intellectual property defamation cases.
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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.
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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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I met my wife Margot on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
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I am hesitant to say this about Barack Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution.
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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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I think at least two of my kids - and I'm - I better not speak them by name because I'm not sure where they are these days, but at least two of them believe in some kind of higher force. The - another is an atheist and the other is still pondering.
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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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What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
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In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now with Barack Obama.
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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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There wasn't much said, but I was thinking, perhaps unkindly - not unkindly,but on - inaccurately of Theodore Dreiser's "Carrie," when the main character in "Carrie" has been brought down by Carrie and his - he - dress is disheveled and all that sort of thing. And that's the last I ever saw of Will Shawn.