Nat Hentoff Quotes
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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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I had written a book called "Boston Boy" some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. One was understanding and coping with anti-Semitism. Boston, at the time, was the most anti-Semitic city in the country. And I found out when I was an adolescent that you have to be crazy to go out after dark all by yourself; you'd get your head bashed in.
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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.
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Throughout Barack Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously.
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The irony is that Barack Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.
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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he Bill Clinton is not tough on crime.
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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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As Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.'
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In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Barack Obama has reneged on his promises.
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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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I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
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Margot Hentoff thinks - first of all, she - this I hear from a lot of people beside her. She thinks that men have no business getting into this argument at all unless they're going to be pro-choice. But it turns out that a fair number of fetuses are male, and besides that, we are all one part of humankind, it seems to me.
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Barack Obama to be much worse than George W. Bush.
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When Bill Clinton was running for president. I'll never forget this one. He was running in New Hampshire. He was not doing well. And he suddenly, over a weekend, rushed back to Little Rock to execute a guy who had killed a cop, but in the process, the policeman had shot him in the head and he was out of it. He didn't know today from tomorrow, good, evil, whatever. His lawyer begged - his lawyer was an old friend of Clinton.
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The media ignores what is really going on.
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I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?" Well, it is not difficult. You tell them stories.
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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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Why has slamming a ball with a racquet become so obsessive a pleasure for so many of us? It seems clear to me that a primary attraction of the sport is the opportunity it gives to release aggression physically without being arrested for felonious assault.
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I say personally because I am 84 years old, and Barack Obama's is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.
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One of the worst elements of Obama's career, which no one talks about, is that he voted twice for a bill that said, if there is a botched abortion, if the child emerges from the womb alive, it should be okay to kill the baby. We have elected a president - twice! - who agrees with infanticide.
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Bill Shawn didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
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I was introduced to jazz, and that's become a basic concern and passion of mine ever since.
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I got a letter one day from somebody saying, `You're always criticizing the press. Why don't you talk about what Clay Felker is doing to your own paper The Voice?' And my 10-year-old son Tom, now with Williams & Connelly, put in a legal opinion, not - an opinion from the back of the car saying, `You know why? What are you, afraid?' So I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Felker is destroying this paper.
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I am against anybody who uses violence to make their points.