Hentoff Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

John Green

#4. Go to the moon - that's my dream.

Steve Jurvetson

#5. The election of a man committed to the cause of freedom and the renewal of America's strength has given encouragement to all those who love liberty.

Margaret Thatcher

#6. Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#7. I love wearing makeup! It's just that if you choose not to wear it, that's OK. And if you choose to wear it, that's OK as well.

Lilly Singh

#8. 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

#9. By defilement of mind, beings are defiled; by purification of mind, beings are purified.

Gautama Buddha

#10. Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

Victor Hugo

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Nat Hentoff

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

Nat Hentoff

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

Nat Hentoff

#16. 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

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

Nat Hentoff

#18. I weigh more than I used to. I've been eating a lot of fast food, so I must have put on some muscle - without even working out!

Jarod Kintz

#19. Shawn Michaels - the greatest WWE champion of all time!

Vince McMahon

#20. 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

#21. The Eucharistic sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ embraces in turn the mystery of our Lord's continuing passion in the members of his mystical body, the church in every age.

Pope Benedict XVI

#22. At the simplicity of the gesture, he felt a pang: the raw nerve of his loneliness exposed.

Maile Meloy

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

Nat Hentoff