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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 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
Worth
Hypocrite
Honest
Agnostic
Place
Believing
Wager
Believe
Surely
Wagers
Always
Prefer
Pascal
Would
Atheist
Agnosticism
Considered
Calculating
Atheism
Questionable

More quotes by Alan Dershowitz

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It's a new phenomenon in America that states can now sue the national government and become a kind of check and balance on the excesses of the federal government.
Alan Dershowitz
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All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth.
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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.
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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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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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The Second Amendment has no place in modern society.
Alan Dershowitz
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We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.
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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African-Americans are as fair as any other group, but they bring their life experiences to bear as just as whites bring their experiences to bear.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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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 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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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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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 Dershowitz
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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 Dershowitz
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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.
Alan Dershowitz
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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
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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 Dershowitz
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I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy.
Alan Dershowitz