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

Alan Dershowitz

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Alan Dershowitz
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 1
Lawyer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Alan M. Dershowitz
Alan Morton Dershowitz
Speech
Violence
Freedom
Fear
Become
Restricting
Justification
Excuse
Threat

More quotes by Alan Dershowitz

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A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.
Alan Dershowitz
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Nobody wants justice.
Alan Dershowitz
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It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.
Alan Dershowitz
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Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Alan Dershowitz
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Any human being has private thoughts.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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Imagine a legal system in which lawyers were equated with the clients they defended and were condemned for representing controversial or despised clients.
Alan Dershowitz
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That's when civil liberty suffers - when we think special times justify the diminution of civil liberties. And I'm not going to accept that.
Alan Dershowitz
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I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.
Alan Dershowitz
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I will continue to fight for justice, fairness, and constitutional rights until my dying breath.
Alan Dershowitz