Alan Dershowitz Quotes - Page 4

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.

The threat of mutually assured destruction worked for the United States during the Cold War because it had proved its willingness to drop nuclear bombs on enemy cities at the end of World War II. It might work less well for Israel, because the Israeli Air Force has never deliberately targeted a large civilian population center, and its leaders have said its morality would not permit it do so.

A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.

I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it - also realizing it.

The law is agnostic about truth.

What the United States has to do is send a clear message to Iran that they will not be able to develop nuclear weapons. Why endure the difficulty of sanctions if they are not going to be able to develop nuclear weapons anyway?

The sad reality is that there are no purely domestic issues in Israel. Issues that would be dealt with by municipalities in other countries - such as how to deal with a dangerous bridge or how to resolve conflicts between religious and secular bus riders - become major international issues when they occur in Israel.

Everybody says they're opposed to torture. But everyone would do it personally if they knew it could save the life of a kidnapped child who had only two hours of oxygen left before death. And it would be the right thing to do.

My goal is always to keep support for Israel a bi-partisan issue and never make a national election any kind of referendum on Israel.

There’s simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder.

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.

Ed Koch will never "rest in peace." That was not his way. He was always nervously squirming, while making others squirm as well. Comfort was not his goal. He understood that to be a proud and assertive Jew meant never being able to leave a sigh of relief and say "it's over, we are at peace, we can now put down our guard and relax."

I think extremists within the base may very well move the Democratic party away from its pro-Israel position.

When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum, in elementary school and high school... There is a permanent record today and it's called the Internet.

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.

For most people, the question why be good - as distinguished from merely law abiding - is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe in firing professors. They have academic freedom.

There are two kinds of terrorism. Rational terrorism such as Palestinian terrorism and apocalyptic terrorism like Sept. 11. You have to distinguish between the two.

It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.

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.