Nat Hentoff Quotes - Page 8

[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.

However, I never thought that [George W.] Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil."

I am hesitant to say this about [Barack] Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution.

The irony is that [Barack] Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now [with Barack Obama].

The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.

The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet.[Barack] Obama has done nothing about that.

He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this [ invasions of privacy ]. So all in all, [Barack] Obama is a disaster.

I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people.

I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like [Barack] Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues.

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.

Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of [Barack] Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."

You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.

I am optimistic. I have to be optimistic.

There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.

[Margot Hentoff] stopped [writing]. She decided that she had nothing more to say. And yet, every day, she has a whole lot to say, and I wish she'd write it down.

I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.

My - mine is based on the fact that Bill Clinton has done - and I'm - this sounds like hyperbole, but he has done more harm to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than any president since John Adams.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

Bill Clinton outshines John Adams in that regard.

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