Top 220 Quotes & Sayings by Nat Hentoff - Page 2

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

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. That book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me.

The need for education for the individual student should be recognized... home, neighborhood. But instead of that, we have the future being determined by standardized testing.

Clay Felker was then - he had - to his credit, he had created New York Magazine, which was the first of the city magazines that covered the city and gave all kinds of advice and all that sort of stuff. And there were copies all over the country by the time he left. He had, however, a view of journalism that was very much, I must say, like Tina Brown's at The New Yorker. You hit 'em hard, fast, give 'em something to talk about the day after the paper comes out, as contrasted with William Shawn, who gave them something to talk about two or three years from then.

We disagree heavily on abortion [with Margot Hentoff].

A particular moment - and I'm not, to this day, quite sure how I feel about it - I had always wanted to be in the law books - you know, Hentoff vs. something or other.

When John Adams - when - James Madison was writing - pretty much writing the Constitution, he got a letter from Thomas Jefferson, who was then-ambassador to France. And Jefferson said - I am paraphrasing - `Do not forget to keep habeas corpus and strengthen it.' That - in - that's the oldest English-speaking right. It goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

Being pro-life is a basic perspective of everything I do.

I found out - the paper used to go to bed on Tues - on Monday. I found out that on Monday nights, the editors would cut out - literally cut out passages, sometimes whole paragraphs, of some of the writers that might possibly offend blacks, lesbians, gays, radicals. And I wrote a couple of columns about that. And they're - of course, they were annoyed that I had written about it, but, I mean, it - another example - and [my wife Margot] always also conjured that.

A.J.[Muste] died in the late '60s, I think. He was 81, something like that.

Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.

The [George W.] Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued.[Barack] Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.

[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.

I don't like to feel intimidated by where I make a living.

It's perfectly within [Martin Peretz] rights [to fire a journalist]. It's a private - you know, th - it's not censorship. The First Amendment doesn't come into play because it's a private magazine.

I read like everybody - like every other writer.

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.

You have an electorate [in America] that wants to see people who are not tough on crime.

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.

Duke Ellington had a song, "What Am I Here For?" - this is what being pro-life is.

Margot [Hentoff] dislikes Bill Clinton because he's totally untrustworthy, and you really ought to have some faith in whoever's going to be your president.

I've - that I regret. That was stupid and ignorant on my part. I went to a party as a guest of a friend of mine, a lawyer. And he had a client who I didn't know, except - maybe I'm pretending I didn't know, but he was a big investor in The New Yorker. And as I found out later in a book about The New Yorker, this guy was very unhappy about [Bill] Shawn.He thought Shawn was spending out - spending too much money on writers.

Abortion happens because of economic circumstances.

I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.

We need to keep trying to rescue the Constitution from the President.

I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's "Life of Christ."

Allen Ginsberg was a remarkable guy. He was himself. He was an original.

Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism.

The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.

I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.

A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.

[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.

Trotsky found out about him - Leon Trotsky - because A.J.[Muste] worked. He was an activist. And he organized the first sit-in strike in Toledo in a factory. And Trotsky was very impressed with that.

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.'

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.

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

I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.

[My wife Margot] was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager [of The Jazz Review], and we got to know each other and we married.

I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School.

[Bill Clinton] has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.

My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.

Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.

I felt better about myself that I did it [calling Max Askeli Commander Askeli], rather than have - rather than thinking it and not writing it for being afraid of what might happen to me.

We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.

The people I admire are those who keep on producing and working and going on.

Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

[William Shawn] took over The Voice and tried to turn it into New York Magazine - very glitzy covers that promised practically nothing in terms of what was inside, very rushed paper anymore. You - not very contemplative, thoughtful or whatever.

[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.

It was a competitive examination [in Boston Latin School]. Poor kids, Brahmans, middle-class kids. The masters, as the teachers were called, didn't give a damn about - how we felt, what was - things like at home. I mean, this goes against the current grain. All they thought about was: `You're here. You made the exam. You can do the work. And if you can't, we'll throw you out.'

Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.

My mother, when she was younger, worked at Filene's in Boston. And she was chief cashier. And I always wondered why she never went back to some kind of work 'cause that was a very responsible position.

He - A.J.[Muste] never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever heard of it.

In our country, [habeas corpus ] means that if you've been sentenced and convicted in a state court, either to death or to some other kind of sentence, you have the right to petition a federal court to review what happened to you. And until [Bill] Clinton, you had three, four, five, even more years I collect records of people who have been on death row for eight, 10, 12, 14 years - this is before Clinton - who finally got a decent lawyer, usually a pro bono lawyer, and an investigator, and were able to find out - they - they're but approved that they're - that they were innocent.

William Shawn was the editor of The New Yorker and for whom I worked for, God, 27 years; a man I respected enormously because of what he did, - what the magazine was about.

My father had always been a traveling salesman - New England, the South, whatever.

We live in the village. We have a summer place in Westport, Connecticut. We don't spend a lot on all kinds of things. But I have no complaints.

The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.

I once did a - the first piece on Malcolm X that anyone had ever seen in the - white press.

The Voice has been politically correct in many of its aspects since before that term was ever used.

[I wanted] to play the clarinet well so I could be in Duke Ellington's band, but that's now impossible.