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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 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
Moral
Evil
Live
Real
Criteria
Make
Evils
Always
Choosing
World
Choose
Choices
More quotes by 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.
Alan Dershowitz
Nobody wants justice.
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.
Alan Dershowitz
A good lawyer knows how to shut up when he's won his case.
Alan Dershowitz
Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.
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.
Alan Dershowitz
I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.
Alan Dershowitz
The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It's 'Nightline.'
Alan Dershowitz
The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.
Alan Dershowitz
Question authority but, raise your hand first.
Alan Dershowitz
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 Dershowitz
On television and in the movies, crimes are always solved. Nothing is left uncertain. By the end, the viewer knows whodunit. In real life, on the other hand, many murders remain unsolved, and even some that are solved to the satisfaction of the police and prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to result in a conviction.
Alan Dershowitz
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 Dershowitz
We live in an age where there is both more expression and more self-censorship than existed even a decade ago. Alas, laws have immunized internet carriers from many of the usual rules that govern public dialogue. Rights must always stay ahead of technology to assure that constitutional protections apply to all forms of communication.
Alan Dershowitz
I am a peace supporting Jew.
Alan Dershowitz
Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern.
Alan Dershowitz
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 Dershowitz
You can't think about terrorism without thinking about Palestinian terrorism. Palestinians began international terrorism. It started with them in 1968. They used it as the first resort, not the last resort. They invented it, they perfected it, they benefited from it and they taught the world how to use it and that it would be successful.
Alan Dershowitz
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 Dershowitz
A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.
Alan Dershowitz