Richard Posner Quotes

#1. Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible.

Richard Posner

#2. In a religiously uniform culture, it is natural for people to take for granted the truth of the prevailing religion and its associated metaphysical propositions.

Richard Posner

#3. I do not know what has caused MacKinnon to become, and, more surprisingly, to remain, so obsessed with pornography, and so zealous for censorship. But let us not sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of her obsession.

Richard Posner

#4. We have a tendency to assume people are a unity, and thus good people all good, etc. But the fact that Hitler was good to dogs and children isn't a paradox.

Richard Posner

#5. One understands why law clerks follow the Bluebook. But why a judge would direct his law clerks to do so, or even tolerate their doing so, is a mystery to me. Are judges sheep? Why should they care what kids at the Harvard Law Review consider proper abbreviation?

Richard A. Posner

#6. As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.

Richard Posner

#7. But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent.

Richard A. Posner

#8. There is always a right moment to stop something.

Paulo Coelho

#9. A diversity of approaches is necessary if there is to be a good chance of hitting on one that works. Progress is a social undertaking & achievement, because people see things differently

Richard Posner

#10. The outstanding examples are still Cardozo's Nature of the Judicial Process18

Richard A. Posner

#11. I do not apologize for these terms or, more generally, for discussing judicial thinking in a vocabulary alien to most judges and lawyers. Judicial behavior cannot be understood in the vocabulary that judges themselves use, sometimes mischievously. (11)

Richard A. Posner

#12. I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy,

Richard Posner

#13. Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.

Richard Posner

#14. Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny - and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today.

Richard Posner

#15. Sean Black writes like a punch to the gut.

Jesse Kellerman

#16. You ought to love and care for your parents in their old age.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#17. Because reputation lags achievement, we should expect people to reach the zenith of their reputation well past the zenith of their productive output

Richard Posner

#18. Cut off's are like real sadist as they watch some folks happy and disappoint the majority. People dream of a life at Delhi University. Delhiites know there is something special about the brand name and life at the campus. Rest as they say is history and it speaks volumes.

Parul Wadhwa

#19. Richard A. Posner is an extraordinary person. If he did not exist, it would be hard to believe that he could. ( ... ) He writes with a flair that puts most journalists to shame and a depth of knowledge that puts most professors to shame.

Alan Ryan

#20. Marcuse also believed that sexuality was a political., an ideological, category, not found but made.

Richard A. Posner

#21. MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it - the harm that pornography does to women - is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence.

Richard Posner

#22. Capitalism is not a synonym for free markets.

Richard A. Posner

#23. The only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction-that same-sex couples and their children don't need marriage because same-sex couples can't produce children, intended or unintended-is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously ...

Richard Posner

#24. If belief in the existence of God is predicted to lead to a feeling of contentment, and the prediction is fulfilled, does it follow that God exists? Surely not. All that would follow would be the desireability of the belief.

Richard Posner

#25. Mychael stopped me with a hand on my arm. "Raine, when we get inside, let me answer all of the questions."
"What, you don't trust my diplomatic skills?"
"You don't have any.

Lisa Shearin