Nat Hentoff Quotes

#1. There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred..

Nat Hentoff

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

Nat Hentoff

#3. 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

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

Nat Hentoff

#5. 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

#6. I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.

Nat Hentoff

#7. I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had

Nat Hentoff

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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.

Nat Hentoff

#11. 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

#12. 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