Nat Hentoff Quotes - Page 5

In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia

Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health.

[Left] are very hesitant to criticize [Barack] Obama, but that is beginning to change.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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

[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 have ] two boys. One, Nicholas, is a criminal defense attorney in Phoenix in which he - gets into - a lot of very controversial cases. He has sued Sheriff Arpaio, the famous sheriff who keeps people in tents, gives them green bologna and the like. My other son Tom is with Williams & Connolly in Washington, where he does intellectual property defamation cases.

Tom [Hentoff] - it started when he was the editor of the paper at Wesleyan and the - members of the staff. This was the first wave of political correctness. The editors of the staff members came and said he must - he must, from now on, stop using `freshmen' and - in-as part of the policy of the paper. It had to be `freshperson.' Therefore, you don't - you're not discriminating against males or females. They were very fervent about that, and he was equally fervent about not politicizing language. So until he left, `freshmen' stayed.

Miranda [Hentoff] is a complete musician. She's a composer, a singer. She writes scripts along - with her projects. And she's a superb teacher. Her teaching pupils have ranged from Itzhak Perlman to Sting.

[Miranda Hentoff] was teaching once at Lincoln Center, and the hall was full of other professionals - musicians, professors, teachers. And she was explaining how [Béla] Bartok composed his second piano concerto. And she explained how the music was interwoven with the rhythms and what he had in his mind. And I was just stunned. This is a kid who used to work - on a piano with a cracked keyboard.

A.J. [Muste] was a - as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.

[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.

In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.

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.