I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.

Judges are the weakest link in our system of justice and they are also the most protected.

The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.

The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.

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.

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.

There are many levels of truth.

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.

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.

There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.

Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.

Freely chosen, discipline is absolute freedom.

If you're a true student of the truth, you may easily get frustrated when people try to make points based on mysticism and cultural beliefs.

Surely you know that pleasure soon evaporates, into thin air?Then all we are left with are stories.

The dead shouldn’t cry, not even the lesser dead.

I've always believed the two best anti-poverty programs are work and marriage.

As I get older, I don't aggressively pursue songs. All the great ones just appear.

I'd not want to answer for the lives of other men; not at seventeen, by God's Grace.

Petersburg, growing up at home, all by my family and friends, Petersburg really, city-raised me, you know everybody there.

In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.