Top 100 Alan Dershowitz Quotes
#1. I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.
Alan Dershowitz
#2. Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is.
Alan Dershowitz
#3. I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.
Alan Dershowitz
#4. Juries are not computers. They are composed of human beings who evaluate evidence differently.
Alan Dershowitz
#5. I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.
Alan Dershowitz
#6. If you're a prosecutor, and you believe the defendant is guilty, you only talk about ultimate truth, but not intermediate truth. If you're the defense attorney, you care deeply about intermediate truth, but you tend to neglect ultimate truth.
Alan Dershowitz
#7. Real heroes are those who face death for a principle - say, to save the lives of others - without any promise of reward.
Alan Dershowitz
#8. Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.
Alan Dershowitz
#9. President Obama has earned my vote on the basis of his excellent judicial appointments, his consensus-building foreign policy and the improvements he has brought about in the disastrous economy he inherited.
Alan Dershowitz
#10. The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.
Alan Dershowitz
#11. Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.
Alan Dershowitz
#12. Ideas don't desert you; ideas aren't treasonous to you, but people can be.
Alan Dershowitz
#13. I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.
Alan Dershowitz
#14. A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.
Alan Dershowitz
#15. Every celebrity case I've been involved in - I've been involved in a great many - the one thing you can be sure of is they don't get the same justice as everybody else. It could be worse, it could be better, it's never the same.
Alan Dershowitz
#16. If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.
Alan Dershowitz
#19. The same independence that got me into trouble in high school got me praise in college.
Alan Dershowitz
#20. My goal is always to keep support for Israel a bi-partisan issue and never make a national election any kind of referendum on Israel.
Alan Dershowitz
#21. I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.
Alan Dershowitz
#22. I never place limits on the potential success of my students. If they're going into acting, they're going to win the Oscar ... If they're going into law, they're going to be chief justice.
Alan Dershowitz
#23. I'm not a single-issue person, but I spend so much time on Israel because it is so unfairly condemned around the world.
Alan Dershowitz
#24. I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.
Alan Dershowitz
#25. A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.
Alan Dershowitz
#26. Individuals have the right to pick and choose which expressions to condemn, which to praise and which to say nothing about. Governments, however, must remain neutral as to the content of expression. And governments must protect the rights of all to express even the most despicable of views.
Alan Dershowitz
#27. I've written important articles on prevention, on the concept of the preventive state, how the law is moving much more in an area of trying to prevent wrongs than trying to deal with them after they occur. That will be my academic/intellectual legacy.
Alan Dershowitz
#28. Our First Amendment expresses a far different calculus for regulating speech than for regulating nonexpressive conduct and that is as it should be. The right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, but your right to express your ideas should not necessarily end at the lobes of my ears.
Alan Dershowitz
#29. I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws ... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy.
Alan Dershowitz
#31. We don't have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets.
Alan Dershowitz
#32. There's no evidence that I'm aware of that guns protect liberty.
Alan Dershowitz
#33. A good lawyer knows how to shut up when he's won his case.
Alan Dershowitz
#34. All speech should be presumed to be protected by the Constitution, and a heavy burden should be placed on those who would censor to demonstrate with relative certainty that the speech at issue, if not censored, would lead to irremediable and immediate serious harm.
Alan Dershowitz
#35. All religions and cultures suffer from sources that preach hate against the 'other.' Throughout history some have, tragically, practiced what their sources preached, while some have sought to dismiss or even counteract the hateful words of their sources.
Alan Dershowitz
#36. If America has the right to target Osama bin Laden, or terrorists, of course Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism.
Alan Dershowitz
#37. I've thought hard about my psychological connections and I think I've managed to separate out the psychological from the legal, moral, and political.
Alan Dershowitz
#39. It's every lawyer's dream to help shape the law, not just react to it.
Alan Dershowitz
#40. I think extremists within the base may very well move the Democratic party away from its pro-Israel position.
Alan Dershowitz
#41. I have been defending Israel's right to exist, and to defend itself against terrorism, for many years-on college campuses, in television appearances and in debate.
Alan Dershowitz
#42. This is not about celebrity justice, this is about the rights of the children.
Alan Dershowitz
#43. Such technological tools ... are helping us now in the hot war against terrorists who would bomb this theater if they had the capacity to do so.
Alan Dershowitz
#44. The worst mistake you can make is underrating your enemy. Assuming that they're evil - I think it's a terrible thing to do.
Alan Dershowitz
#45. All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth.
Alan Dershowitz
#46. The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.
Alan Dershowitz
#47. Everybody says they're opposed to torture. But everyone would do it personally if they knew it could save the life of a kidnapped child who had only two hours of oxygen left before death. And it would be the right thing to do,
Alan Dershowitz
#48. I charge my wealthy clients a lot and put 10 per cent in a fund which I use to pay the expenses of my poorer clients. When the government gangs up on the poor schnook in the street, someone has to stand up for him.
Alan Dershowitz
#49. I am deeply concerned that, without peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish and democratic nature of Israel is in danger. That's why I have opposed Israel's settlement policy since 1973, and that's why I have favored a two-state solution since 1967.
Alan Dershowitz
#50. The prosecution wants to make sure the process by which the evidence was obtained is not truthfully presented, because, as often as not, that process will raise questions.
Alan Dershowitz
#51. It's much better to have rules that we can actually live within. And absolute prohibitions, generally, are not the kind of rules that countries would live within.
Alan Dershowitz
#53. I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.
Alan Dershowitz
#54. There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.
Alan Dershowitz
#55. In today's distorted world of 'human rights,' truth takes a back seat to ideology, and false claims - especially those that 'support' radical ideologies - persist even after they have been exposed.
Alan Dershowitz
#56. Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Alan Dershowitz
#57. Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.
Alan Dershowitz
#59. I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong.
Alan Dershowitz
#60. We have to fulfill what the real meaning of the Second Amendment is: reasonable access to guns for self-protection and for hunting. And there's no room in America for these semiautomatic, automatic and other kinds of weapons that are simply designed to cause mass havoc.
Alan Dershowitz
#61. There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.
Alan Dershowitz
#62. The vast majority of gun owners don't kill, but people who do kill, tend to kill with guns, and often with illegal guns.
Alan Dershowitz
#63. I think mistakes are the essence of science and law. It's impossible to conceive of either scientific progress or legal progress without understanding the important role of being wrong and of mistakes.
Alan Dershowitz
#64. I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.
Alan Dershowitz
#65. No country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for its people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done since its relatively recent rebirth in 1948.
Alan Dershowitz
#66. In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.
Alan Dershowitz
#67. What the United States has to do is send a clear message to Iran that they will not be able to develop nuclear weapons. Why endure the difficulty of sanctions if they are not going to be able to develop nuclear weapons anyway?
Alan Dershowitz
#68. Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.
Alan Dershowitz
#69. The first rule for escaping prison in the United States is always having someone more important than yourself to incriminate.
Alan Dershowitz
#70. It is the wall of separation between church and state ... that is largely responsible for religion thriving in this country, as compared to those European countries in which church and state have been united, resulting in opposition to the church by those who disapprove of the government.
Alan Dershowitz
#71. I never had a strategy about my life. I didn't have enough information to have a strategy. I'm the first person in my family to go to college. I had no family mentors.
Alan Dershowitz
#72. Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.
Alan Dershowitz
#73. Israel can't make peace without the clear support of the United States.
Alan Dershowitz
#74. There are two kinds of terrorism. Rational terrorism such as Palestinian terrorism and apocalyptic terrorism like Sept. 11. You have to distinguish between the two.
Alan Dershowitz
#75. Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.
Alan Dershowitz
#76. For most people, the question why be good - as distinguished from merely law abiding - is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell.
Alan Dershowitz
#77. I never do anything for money; I get paid a lot of money as a by-product.
Alan Dershowitz
#78. I think most defense attorneys honestly believe the principle that says, 'Better 10 guilty go free than even one possibly innocent person be convicted.'
Alan Dershowitz
#79. Imagine a legal system in which lawyers were equated with the clients they defended and were condemned for representing controversial or despised clients.
Alan Dershowitz
#80. I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it; also realizing it. Most lawyers are very successful, and they think that because they're making money and people think well of them, they must be doing everything right.
Alan Dershowitz
#81. I'm a very tough guy, and I fight hard, and I don't give up. And that makes me friends and that makes me enemies, and I know that.
Alan Dershowitz
#82. I love discomfort. I mean, my whole life is discomfort. One reason I can never retire is that the idea of just sitting on the beach totally comfortable is not a desideratum in my life. I like ambiguity, I like conflict, I like uncertainly.
Alan Dershowitz
#83. Well, first of all, no professor should be able to say, I refuse to defend my position. I refuse to debate my position.
Alan Dershowitz
#84. Israel and the Palestinians must resolve their own differences. The United States can play an important role as facilitator and guarantor.
Alan Dershowitz
#85. You're absolutely right: Bob Grant is a racist, Bob Grant is a bigot, he's a despicable talk show host and I agree with that.
Alan Dershowitz
#86. Rights are not self-evident. They're not unalienable. They are subject to modification just like anything else.
Alan Dershowitz
#87. I never had an existential moment when I asked myself what I was going to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer, and I knew exactly the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.
Alan Dershowitz
#88. I've had such a satisfying life professionally and personally. I hope my tombstone says, 'Never boring.'
Alan Dershowitz
#91. I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.
Alan Dershowitz
#92. The pervasiveness of guns in our society is destroying America.
Alan Dershowitz
#93. I've thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don't own the rights to the letters.
Alan Dershowitz
#94. It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.
Alan Dershowitz
#95. A state has the right to prohibit the killing of dogs and bears whether for film or for other purposes.
Alan Dershowitz
#96. I generally don't select my chicken or my hamburgers based on the personal ideology of the person who is either flipping the hamburgers or making the money back at corporate headquarters. But if people want to do that, they're free to do it.
Alan Dershowitz
#100. It's wrong, and it's racist, and it's bigoted to say that guns are quintessentially American.
Alan Dershowitz
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
