Nat Hentoff Quotes
-
That race is still part of what Barack Obama is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now with Barack Obama.
-
I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people.
-
You have an electorate in America that wants to see people who are not tough on crime.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.
-
When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.
-
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.
-
Barack Obama to be much worse than George W. Bush.
-
I think one thing we share with my wife is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.
-
The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England.
-
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.
-
My wife has some investments and stuff.
-
Bill Shawn didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
-
I am against anybody who uses violence to make their points.
-
A.J. Muste never engaged in violence but he believed, as Mahatma Gandhi did - and he knew Gandhi slightly - he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community.
-
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.
-
What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for The New Republic, I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing fire a journalist.