Best 140 quotes of Alan Dershowitz on MyQuotes

Alan Dershowitz

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    A good lawyer knows how to shut up when he's won his case.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    A state has the right to prohibit the killing of dogs and bears whether for film or for other purposes.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    But the United States is neither a Christian nation nor the exclusive home of any particular religious group. Non-Christians are not guests. We are as much hosts as any Mayflower-descendant Protestant. It is our home as well as theirs. And in a home with so many owners, there can be no official sectarian prayer. That is what the First Amendment is all about, and the first act by the new administration was in defiance of our Constitution.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Ed Koch will never "rest in peace." That was not his way. He was always nervously squirming, while making others squirm as well. Comfort was not his goal. He understood that to be a proud and assertive Jew meant never being able to leave a sigh of relief and say "it's over, we are at peace, we can now put down our guard and relax.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard don't see the danger of the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I am a man of principle. I will stick by my principles. I will tell the truth no matter where the chips fall.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I can't find anything in the Constitution that says you prefer the life of the mother, or the convenience of the mother if it's an abortion by choice, over the potential life of the fetus. Look, I think women, if they're required to not have abortions, could die and could - so I favor a woman's right to choose.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Ideas don't desert you; ideas aren't treasonous to you, but people can be.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I'd require that every university, public or private, be governed by the constitutional standards regarding freedom of expression and due process. There is no reason for treating adult college students any differently in the university setting than in the outside world.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    If America has the right to target Osama bin Laden, or terrorists, of course Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I fear that the impact of university censorship and university denial of due process will be to mis-educate a generation of students away from core values of civil liberties and constitutional safeguards. Students who have been led to believe by university administrators and faculty that censorship and denial of due process are acceptable norms will be more susceptible to accepting those norms in their post-university lives. That would be a tragedy for America.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    If we move away from the American tradition of lawyers defending those with whom they vehemently disagree -- as we temporarily did during the McCarthy period -- we weaken our commitment to the rule of law... So beware of an approach which limits advocacy to that which is approved by the standards of political correctness.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place. Any God worth "believing in" would surely prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I have made a career out of arguing that we shouldn't be criminalizing political differences. I've made a career out of arguing that the grand jury is an abusive institution. I have made a career out of arguing that we shouldn't stretch and expand the criminal law. I'm not going to change it because you think these are abnormal times. When Thomas Jefferson told the Justice Department that they had to prosecute Aaron Burr, and that he was going to have the chief justice impeached unless he found Aaron Burr guilty, those were special times too.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I have no doubt that if an actual ticking bomb situation were to arise, our law enforcement authorities would torture. The real debate is whether such torture should take place outside of our legal system or within it. The answer to this seems clear: If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    Imagine a legal system in which lawyers were equated with the clients they defended and were condemned for representing controversial or despised clients.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I'm not a single-issue person, but I spend so much time on Israel because it is so unfairly condemned around the world.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    I'm worried about privacy because of the young people who don't give a damn about their privacy, who are prepared to put their entire private lives online. They put stuff on Facebook that 15 years from now will prevent them from getting the jobs they want. They don't understand that they are mortgaging their future for a quick laugh from a friend.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.

  • By Anonym
    Alan Dershowitz

    In our criminal justice system, we say it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for even one innocent person to be wrongly convicted.