Top 46 Alan M Dershowitz Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.
Alan Dershowitz
#3. The same independence that got me into trouble in high school got me praise in college.
Alan Dershowitz
#4. A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.
Alan M. Dershowitz
#5. I understand that it's good tactics to categorize me as a close-minded, unobjective extremist, but nobody that respects me has those views.
Alan Dershowitz
#6. 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
#7. I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.
Alan Dershowitz
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years.
Jim Bakker
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.
Alan Dershowitz
#17. I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws ... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy.
Alan Dershowitz
#19. There's no evidence that I'm aware of that guns protect liberty.
Alan Dershowitz
#20. I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.
Alan M. Dershowitz
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.
Alan Dershowitz
#24. 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
#25. Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is.
Alan Dershowitz
#26. 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
#27. Juries are not computers. They are composed of human beings who evaluate evidence differently.
Alan Dershowitz
#28. 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
#29. Freedom of speech means freedom for those who you despise, and freedom to express the most despicable views. It also means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.
Alan Dershowitz
#30. 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
#31. Real heroes are those who face death for a principle - say, to save the lives of others - without any promise of reward.
Alan Dershowitz
#32. Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.
Alan Dershowitz
#33. Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.
Alan Dershowitz
#34. 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
#35. When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It's a display of terrible intolerance.
Alan Dershowitz
#36. 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
#37. Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.
Alan Dershowitz
#38. Ideas don't desert you; ideas aren't treasonous to you, but people can be.
Alan Dershowitz
#39. 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
#41. A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.
Alan Dershowitz
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.
Alan Dershowitz
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
