Top 100 Alan M. Dershowitz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

2. “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 M. Dershowitz

3. “The best answer to bad speech is good speech.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

4. “Question authority; but, raise your hand first.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

5. “A good lawyer knows how to shut up when he’s won his case.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

6. “It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

7. “The defendant wants to hide the truth because he’s generally guilty. The defense attorney’s job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

8. “Nobody wants justice.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

9. “It’s never acceptable to target civilians. It violates the Geneva Accords, it violates the international law of war and it violates all principles of morality.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

11. “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 M. Dershowitz

12. “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 M. Dershowitz

13. “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 M. Dershowitz

14. “There are many levels of truth.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

15. “I learn from experience.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

17. “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 M. Dershowitz

18. “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 M. Dershowitz

19. “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 M. Dershowitz

20. “There’s simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

25. “When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It’s a display of terrible intolerance.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

26. “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 M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

28. “The Internet knows no national borders.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

29. “Any human being has private thoughts.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

30. “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 M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

32. “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 M. Dershowitz

33. “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 M. Dershowitz

34. “The struggle for morality never stays won. It’s always in process.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

35. “The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

36. “Judges are the weakest link in our system of justice, and they are also the most protected.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

37. “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 M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

39. “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 M. Dershowitz

40. “The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It’s ‘Nightline.’”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

41. “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 M. Dershowitz

42. “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 M. Dershowitz

43. “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 M. Dershowitz

44. “This is not about celebrity justice, this is about the rights of the children.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

45. “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 M. Dershowitz

46. “Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

47. “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 M. Dershowitz

48. “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 M. Dershowitz

49. “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 M. Dershowitz

50. “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 M. Dershowitz