25 Quotes by Richard Posner

The Constitution has to be interpreted loosely, otherwise it becomes a straitjacket. You can't interpret it literally. You can pretend to, and go digging around in 18th Century dictionaries to figure out what 'cruel and unusual punishment' meant or what the 'right to bear arms' meant, but that is all fake really. The Constitution has to be interpreted in light of modern needs, and that's what they (the strict interpreters) end up doing in spite of all their investigations.

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

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....

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.

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.

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

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.