Nat Hentoff famous quotes

03-28-2025

I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had
-- Nat Hentoff

#Thinking #President #Dangerous
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Christian #Religious #Doors
Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Essence #Criticism #Body
I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Firsts #United States #First Amendment
Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Art #Jazz #Fortune
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Government #Ideas #Guy
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Mean #Fighting #Liberty
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Sports #Opportunity #Giving
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Country #Government #Ideas
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Fighting #Surrender #Notion
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Years #Firsts #Administration
I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Lawyer #Trapeze #Wanted
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Atheist #Passion #Expression
There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Sacred #Life Is #Seamless
I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Men #Years #Editors
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Baby #Children #Careers
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Rights #Ideas #People
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Son #Years #Voice
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Parent #Bars #My Family
Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Musician
The media ignores what is really going on.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Media
I read like everybody - like every other writer.
-- Nat Hentoff
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Mean #Government #Trying
[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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Children #Book #Kids
I was introduced to jazz, and that's become a basic concern and passion of mine ever since.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Passion #Jazz #Concern
[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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#New York #School #Church
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.
-- Nat Hentoff

#Hero #Texas #Ku Klux Klan
What we have now in America is a surveillance society.
-- Nat Hentoff

#America #Surveillance

You may also like:

A. J. Muste
Activist
Abbey Lincoln
Vocalist
Babatunde Olatunji
Drummer
Booker Little
Trumpeter
Cecil Taylor
Jazz Pianist
Charles Mingus
Bassist
Coleman Hawkins
Saxophonist
Ella Fitzgerald
Vocalist
Eric Dolphy
Saxophonist
Lenny Bruce
Comedian
Leonard Feather
Jazz Pianist
Lester Young
Saxophonist
Mark Twain
Author
Mary Lou Williams
Jazz Pianist
Mort Sahl
Comedian
Norman Granz
Music Producer
Paul Krassner
Author
Roy Eldridge
Trumpeter
Stanley Crouch
Poet
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Author