Nat Hentoff
Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices - taking advantage of our freedom of speech - who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.Collection: Country
Americans have only the dimmest notion of what their constitutional freedoms are - and what it took to get them...[and] the willingness to surrender what we're supposed to be fighting for is a recurring part of our history.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Years
I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.Collection: Lawyer
There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.Collection: Sacred
I have I guess 3 passions. One is the Constitution. The other is jazz and the other is being an atheist prolifer which, of course, gets me in a lot of trouble - all of which combines into free expression.Collection: Atheist
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.Collection: Secret
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.Collection: Baby
A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.Collection: Rights
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.Collection: Son
[Bill Clinton] was the man, as a matter of fact, who, in terms of the Communications Decency Act, which would have made the Internet, the whole concept of cyberspace, vulnerable to rampant censorship - he pushed that bill, and I know the man in the Justice Department whom he persuaded - the guy didn't want to lose his job - to write the bill.Collection: Jobs
Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.Collection: Musician
I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever hadCollection: Thinking
The media ignores what is really going on.Collection: Media
A reporter is never put off by somebody not wanting to be interviewed.Collection: Reporters
A liberal was somebody who expected and hoped that government would help the poor - you know, that whole routine. I did not know then and I've learned since that in an area that means a lot to me, free speech, liberals are as bad as many conservatives in trying to censor speech.Collection: Mean
[Madness] happened so frequently. I think what I was most maddest about - and it's in the book [Speaking Freely: A Memoir] - when the House and the Senate, back in 1984, were debating a bill that would - at least delay and maybe stop some of the ex - summary execution of disabled children - infants. And the Down syndrome kids and other kids had been, in some cases, routinely let die, to use the euphemism.Collection: Children
I was introduced to jazz, and that's become a basic concern and passion of mine ever since.Collection: Passion
I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.Collection: Fire
[A.J. Muste] was from Michigan and he grew up in the Dutch Reform Church there, which is a fairly strict church. He later came to New York. He was the minister of a labor temple in the - on the East Side. Then he founded, to my knowledge, the first, maybe the only, labor school; that is, Cornell has a labor department and other schools. But this was a school for - entirely for labor organizers, and he was the - the chairman.Collection: New York
What we have now in America is a surveillance society.Collection: America
There's a black lawyer in Galveston, Texas, who was the unpaid NAACP general counsel in Texas. He had a great record in housing discrimination, labor discrimination. He decided to take as a client a member of the Ku Klux Klan because the state wanted to get the membership lists of the Klan to find out if they could get something on the Klan. And he said, `I got to take you. I despise you. But we, the NAACP, won that case; NAACP vs. Alabama in the 1950s. Nobody has the right to get your membership lists.' He was fired from the NAACP. To me, he's a hero.Collection: Hero
I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.Collection: Firsts
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.Collection: Sports
My contact with [Cato] was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Mother
If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.Collection: Running
I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.Collection: Reading
Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.Collection: War
They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.Collection: Done
I had not been very kind to J. Edgar Hoover. And the field agent had written on - it was sent directly to Hoover - that - the director should see this - `And, besides, Hentoff is a lousy writer.' And I thought that went a bit far.Collection: Directors
My parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.Collection: Parent
[My father] was very impressed when he saw "Death of a Salesman," I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.Collection: Father
The main jobs would be The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and - I'm thinking of The Reporter when Max Askeli was there, but I got fired from The Reporter.Collection: Jobs
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].Collection: Character
[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Morning
I was less angry at [Carl] Armstrong, though I was angry at the people who came to his trial: Dan Ellsberg, who ordinarily I respected a lot; Philip Berrigan; the guy who teaches at Princeton still - I can't remember his name. And they were saying - well, they were saying, really, what Arthur Koestler had people saying on "Darkness at Noon." The means were unfortunate and, sadly, someone died, but the end is what is important and this was a great symbolic - something or other - sign against the war in Vietnam.Collection: War
I went to a lecture of [Arthur Koestler ] once, I never met him.Collection: Lectures
Young people get very excited when they hear why they are Americans. It is not hard to do.Collection: People
I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.Collection: War
[Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon".Collection: Book
Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.Collection: People
When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.Collection: Virginia
[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.Collection: Phones
[Max Askeli] started this very good magazine [The Reporter]. In fact, Meg Greenfield, who's now the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was one of the star reporters there.Collection: Stars
Max Askeli was a very courageous, principled man up to a point. He had left Italy before he was thrown in jail by [Francesco] Mussolini.Collection: Men
I was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, `It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'Collection: Running
[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.Collection: Bills