Richard Posner Quotes

A diversity of approaches is necessary if there is to be a good chance of hitting on one that works. Progress is a social undertaking & achievement, because people see things differently

MacKinnon’s treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it – the harm that pornography does to women – is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence.

Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.

If belief in the existence of God is predicted to lead to a feeling of contentment, and the prediction is fulfilled, does it follow that God exists? Surely not. All that would follow would be the desireability of the belief.

I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.

We have a tendency to assume people are a unity, and thus good people all good, etc. But the fact that Hitler was good to dogs and children isn’t a paradox.

Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible.

In a religiously uniform culture, it is natural for people to take for granted the truth of the prevailing religion and its associated metaphysical propositions.

Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny – and judging from the record of this case, not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today.

As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.

I do not know what has caused MacKinnon to become, and, more surprisingly, to remain, so obsessed with pornography, and so zealous for censorship. But let us not sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of her obsession.

Because reputation lags achievement, we should expect people to reach the zenith of their reputation well past the zenith of their productive output

The only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction-that same-sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended-is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.