Quotes from Nat Hentoff

The general unemployment rate is going to continue for a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum.

I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally - and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles.

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.

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

An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way [Barack] Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system.

When I approached one of his secretaries for an interview, I was told that Bob [Dylan] didn't want to see me anymore because of what my wife Margot [Hentoff] had written.

Whenever I see that kind of story, where everybody agrees, I know there's something wrong.

Most of us lead or are led by lives of patterned regularity. Diurnally, surprises are relatively few. And except for economic or physical uncertainties, we neither face nor court significant degrees of risk because a fundamental drive in the vast majority of us is toward the attainment of as much security as is possible. In this sense, jazzmen, of all musicians, are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

We are talking about preventing our students from reading Huckleberry Finn! And why? Because it offends some people. Show me a book that offends no one, and i will show you a book that no one, in the whole history of the world, has ever willingly read.

In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King's march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.

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.

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

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 wish [my wife] would [work] because - especially now the kind of - I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that - nobody else around has now.

Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt . A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.

The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.

I really envy, in some respects, some of the people of faith I've known - A.J.[Muste], for example.

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.

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

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.