Top 100 Alan M. Dershowitz Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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 M. Dershowitz

52. “I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I’m really a New Yorker.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

53. “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 M. Dershowitz

54. “The Palestinians will eventually have a state, but it should not come as a reward for terrorism.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

55. “I’ve thought hard about my psychological connections and I think I’ve managed to separate out the psychological from the legal, moral, and political.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

56. “I’ve had such a satisfying life professionally and personally. I hope my tombstone says, ‘Never boring.’”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

57. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

58. “I think there would be less torture with a warrant requirement than without one.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

59. “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 M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

61. “Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has warned that if terrorism is rewarded in the Middle East, it will “be coming to a theatre near you.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

62. “The vast majority of gun owners don’t kill, but people who do kill, tend to kill with guns, and often with illegal guns.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

63. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

64. “I personally favor the creation of a Palestinian state as a consequence of making best efforts to end terrorism, not as a reward for increasing terrorism as a carefully calculated tactic to achieve statehood.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

66. “The Second Amendment has no place in modern society.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

67. “The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

68. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

69. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

70. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

71. “The prosecution wants to make sure the process by which the evidence was obtained is not truthfully presented, because, as often as not, that process will raise questions.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

72. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

73. “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 M. Dershowitz

74. “The law is agnostic about truth.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

75. “I’ve thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don’t own the rights to the letters.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

76. “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 M. Dershowitz

77. “Ideas don’t desert you; ideas aren’t treasonous to you, but people can be.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

78. “There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

79. “Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

80. “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 M. Dershowitz

81. “Most liberal democracies don’t try to figure out what the truth is.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

82. “Rights are not self-evident. They’re not unalienable. They are subject to modification just like anything else.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

83. “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 M. Dershowitz

84. “The first rule for escaping prison in the United States is always having someone more important than yourself to incriminate.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

85. “There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that guns protect liberty.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

86. “Yet the world, including many in the media, academia, and even diplomacy, seems to accept Palestinian violence as cultural. On the other hand, something different is expected from Israelis. This is cultural relativism bordering on racism. To expect less of Palestinians, regardless of their grievances, is to diminish their humanity.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

87. “It is fair to say that although Israeli actions in combating terrorism have been far from perfect, Israel has been in greater compliance with the rule of law than any other country facing comparable dangers.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

88. “It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

89. “I don’t believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

90. “There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

91. “I know Obama, I like Obama, I voted for Obama.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

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

— Alan M. Dershowitz

93. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

94. “I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

95. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

96. “Israel and the Palestinians must resolve their own differences. The United States can play an important role as facilitator and guarantor.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

97. “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.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

98. “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 M. Dershowitz

99. “Well, first of all, no professor should be able to say, I refuse to defend my position. I refuse to debate my position.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz

100. “I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they’re wrong. And not just admitting it – also realizing it.”

— Alan M. Dershowitz