Nat Hentoff Quotes

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

If this new breed of activist urged Obama to hammer away at the Constitution, old-school civil libertarians lamented its demolition. The longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff had fought many a battle for civil liberties and had scars enough to speak his mind. “Apparently he doesn’t give one damn about the separation of powers.” said Hentoff of Obama after the president’s “pen and phone” remarks. “Never before in our history has a president done these things.

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.

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.

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.

Recently, an internationally renowned writer for children commented about the Council [on Interracial Books for Children, Inc.] to me: “Of course, we should all be more tender and understanding toward the aged and we should work to shrive ourselves of racism and sexism, but when you impose guidelines like theirs on writing, you’re strangling the imagination. And that means that you’re limiting the ability of children to imagine. If all books for them were ‘cleansed’ according to these criteria, it would be the equivalent of giving them nothing to eat but white bread.” “To write according to such guidelines,” this story teller continued, “is to take the life out of what you do. Also the complexity, the ambivalence. And thereby the young reader gets no real sense of the wonders and terrors and unpredictabilities of living. Paradoxically, censors like the council clamor for ‘truth’ but are actually working to flatten children’s reading experiences into the most misleading, simplistic kinds of untruth.” ("Any Writer Who Follows Anyone Else's Guidelines Ought to Be in Advertising" (1977), from Beyond Fact: Nonfiction for Children and Young People, 1982)

All in all, nothing was broken, so nothing needed fixing. Dr. Meyerson ended by saying that I was an idealist, a condition that would lead me to certain unpleasant surprises but was otherwise not necessarily a debilitating trait.

It’s up to me,” George would say, “to point out who the bastards really are in this life.

Tell me, Mrs. Hentoff,” said our lawyer, “after he read the reference to him in Mr. Frazier’s column, what was your husband’s reaction?” “He was very upset,” Mrs. Hentoff answered. “He couldn’t sleep.” “Well, how long did this last?” asked our lawyer who had advised her that a year would be an effective answer. “Well, how long could it last?” the forthright Mrs. Hentoff answered. “Two nights. Three nights.” Much laughter in the courtroom, including the jury box and the bench.

Frazier went on to New York for some years, working for Life and then free-lancing. Wherever he was, one of Frazier’s abiding pleasures was his enemies list, and by the 1950s I was on it: my ear was tin, my politics were trendy, and my writing style was impenetrable (which was all to the common good, Frazier added).

George had two primary reasons for writing. First, like all writers, he wanted to call attention to himself. Second, he wanted to call attention to writers, performers, and a very few politicians who had duende. He once explained duende as “heightened panache” or “overpowering presence.” At another time he said that while duende is very difficult to define, “when it is there, it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe,” making “icy fingers run down our spine.” Lady Day, Lee Wiley, James Michael Curley had duende. “My God,” wrote Frazier, “how James Michael Curley had it! How he quickened our memory.

Jo told me where the music had come from, where he had come from, and how to listen. He leaned forward. “Now, when you hear a jazz musician up on that stand, he is telling you what happened to him this afternoon, the night before, what has happened to him during his whole life. This is serious business. And”—Jo shot me with a long finger—“there is no way a jazz musician, if he is a real jazz musician, can hide any of that, because we play ourselves, not Beethoven or whoever.

As N. Rubashov says to his diary in Darkness at Noon: “We concentrated all our efforts on preventing error and destroying the very seeds of it.

Don’t say anything you can’t back up.” It was, of course, the most useful instruction in journalism I have ever been given.

Remember, kid,” Frank said, “if you’ve got the goods on them, there’s nothing they can do to you. Except kill you.

Years later, at a bar, between sets of the volcanic Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, I am telling a black nationalist and Mingus about Jewish blues, blues that are thousands of years old, blues with plenty of their own soul. Mingus is interested. He wants to hear some. But the other guy, he says blues are only one color, his. Mingus says words sure do get in the way of hearing.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had proclaimed, without fear of political reprisal, that these immigrants and their progeny were “inferior.

Aparticularly vivid figure in The Last Hurrah is named Charlie Hennessy. While many readers recognized Frank Skeffington as James Michael Curley, only Boston readers of the novel were likely to know that Charlie Hennessy was actually Clem Norton, for many years an unsuccessful political opponent and bemused admirer of James Michael Curley.

Politics, in any case, was of less compelling interest to me in those immediate post–bar mitzvah years than jazz, the Boston Red Sox, and the girls, mostly dark but a few golden, of our ghetto. That is, until Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. I read it the summer I was seventeen. That one book, about all the Stalins in all the centuries, immunized me from then on against any variant, anywhere in the world, of the credo that infects both executioners and victims in Darkness at Noon: “The only moral criterion we recognize is that of social utility.

As for me, I decided that when you know exactly what someone is going to say in answer to every single question you ask, you ought to put your nickel in some other machine.

how each had betrayed the people and Jim Curley (same thing),

If the best man’s faults were written on his forehead, it would make him pull his hat over his eyes.

At that point, O’Connor wrote, “The figure on the bed stirred . . . Skeffington had raised himself slightly. His eyes were now wide open, and in them they saw the old challenging, mocking gleam. And they heard his voice, as taking charge now for the last time, he gave his answer: “‘The hell I would!’” Standing in the public car, O’Connor was still debating whether to go over and talk to the Governor when Curley motioned to the novelist to sit down beside him. “You know,” Curley said melodiously, “the part of your book I liked the best was when I was dying.