Alan Dershowitz Quotes

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.

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.

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.

It's every lawyer's dream to help shape the law, not just react to it.

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.

When I was 14 or 15, a camp counselor told me I was smart. I had never been very good in school, but he told me once that I was smart but my mind operated a little differently.

When the Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis in 1944 we passed the War Refugee Act, which focused on rescuing Jews, a religious group. But if the religious group is the subject of the persecution based on their religion, it's perfectly OK for a First Amendment-bound society to emphasize their rescue, just as it is perfectly OK to emphasize the fact that many, if not all of the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, come from countries with a history of supporting terrorism.

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.

The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.

Nobody wants justice.

I am a peace supporting Jew.

I know Obama, I like Obama, I voted for Obama.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Internet knows no national borders.

I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it - also realizing it.

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.

Twenty five percent of Israeli citizens are not even Jewish. Anybody can become an Israeli citizen if you qualify. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship.

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.

When I decide who to vote for as President, I ask myself who will be best for America and for the world. An important component of my answer involves my assessment of the candidate's willingness and ability to protect Israel's security, since I strongly believe that a strong Israel serves the interests of the United States and of world peace.

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.

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

When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It's a display of terrible intolerance.

We, the People of this country, have no unalienable rights... all our rights are subject to modification... the Constitution of the United States of America is nothing more than a piece of paper and... our government should not be restrained by the Constitution because our government can do good things for people.

Question authority; but, raise your hand first.

The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.

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.

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.

To ask about the 'source' of rights or morals assumes an erreous conclusion. To ask about the source of morals is to assume that such a source exists. As if it existed outside of human constructed systems. The 'source' is the human ability to learn from experience and to entrench rights in our laws and in our consciousness. Our rights come from our long history of wrongs.

The worst mistake you can make is underrating your enemy. Assuming that they're evil - I think it's a terrible thing to do.

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.

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.