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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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Alan Dershowitz
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: September 1
Lawyer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Alan M. Dershowitz
Alan Morton Dershowitz
Suffering
Suffers
Times
Liberties
Going
Justify
Think
Civil
Thinking
Accept
Accepting
Liberty
Special
Diminution

More quotes by Alan Dershowitz

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I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it also realizing it. Most lawyers are very successful, and they think that because they're making money and people think well of them, they must be doing everything right.
Alan Dershowitz
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Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.
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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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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There are many levels of truth.
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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Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard don't see the danger of the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.
Alan Dershowitz
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Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.
Alan Dershowitz
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The very concept of an Iranian university is an oxymoron. There are no free and open places of learning in that repressive theocracy. Dissenters are not given tenure they are murdered, after first being tortured. Blasphemy, which is broadly defined, is punished. Gays are not only excluded from Iranian universities, but are imprisoned and killed.
Alan Dershowitz
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In our criminal justice system, we say it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for even one innocent person to be wrongly convicted.
Alan Dershowitz
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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
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There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.
Alan Dershowitz
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I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.
Alan Dershowitz
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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 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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Any human being has private thoughts.
Alan Dershowitz
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It's every lawyer's dream to help shape the law, not just react to it.
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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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
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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 Dershowitz