Top 75 Adam Cohen Quotes

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life.

‘Hard Times’ does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel’s subjects managed to find silver linings.

A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information.

If you’re going to call a book ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,’ readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.

Amazon is holding its own because the service it provides – offering millions of books and other items quickly and easily from home at any hour of the day or night – is a real one, and one that was impossible before there was an Internet.

Law graduates have always ended up in business, government, journalism and other fields. Law schools could do more to build these subjects into their coursework.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the major achievement of President Obama’s first term.

If the Supreme Court rules that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of property, it would put all sorts of zoning rules in danger.

There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.

State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.

Our movements reveal a great deal about who we are. A record of our locations over time can reveal whether we go to tent revivals or radical political meetings, abortion clinics or AIDS doctors.

Defending Congressional authority should not be a partisan issue.

Even a single Justice can have a profound impact on the country.

The remarkable thing about ‘Avatar’ is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na’Vi natives in 3-D because ‘Avatar’ is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully.

For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of ‘Mad Men’ are good company.

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.

If the courts regarded tweets and other social media information as private, it would not prevent the law enforcement from getting information it really needs. But the government would have to get a search warrant, which requires it to show that it has probable cause connecting what is being searched to a crime.

To be rejected on account of old age may or may not feel the same as being rejected on the basis of race or sex. But it is clearly unjust and dehumanizing, and the law should take it more seriously than it does.

The Supreme Court’s most conservative Justices have presented themselves as great respecters of precedent and opponents of ‘judicial activism’ – of judges using the Constitution to strike down laws passed by the elected branches of government. If they are true to those principles, they should uphold rent control.

Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leech off society – like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.

Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.

Mississippi’s loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest.

It is hard to imagine an area in which Congress has more express constitutional authority to act than in protecting the right of minorities to vote.

If apes are given the right to humane treatment, it just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins.

After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.

Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right – and the national government should protect it.

As self-driving cars become more common, there will be a flood of new legal questions.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,’ it is played for laughs.

Age discrimination is illegal. But when compared with discrimination against racial minorities and women, it is a second-class civil rights issue.

The Senate should refuse to confirm nominees who do not take Congressional power seriously.

A Reagan appointee, Justice Kennedy is no liberal, as he has shown on issues from affirmative action to corporate campaign spending. But he has repeatedly sided with gay litigants before the court.

Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.

With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial – and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.

Patents have a place in medical science – for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

Set in the advertising world of the 1960s, ‘Mad Men’ is stunning to look at – a Camelot-era parade of smartly dressed professionals lounging around on midcentury modern furniture.

The press should not get special privileges – if they drive recklessly or put people in danger, they should be subject to every reckless driving and endangerment law on the books – but they should also not be singled out for special punishment.

Federal law should hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they make good-faith mistakes while registering people.

The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.

Being unemployed – or working at minimum wage – is rough in the best of circumstances.

People’s genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up ‘locational privacy.’

The worst excesses of the dot-com era are gone.

When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.

Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ delivers both.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.

Lawsuits prod companies to make their products safer.

A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.

When the gun lobby fights gun-control legislation, its logic is clear: it does not like laws that prevent people from owning or using guns.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us – and the government wants to be able to see it.

If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.

A key reason that elections are run so badly is that in most states, political partisans are in charge.

It is not hard to see why the FBI wants wiretapping backdoors. It would certainly make its job easier. But rejiggering the Internet so government can conveniently monitor everything we say and do online is too high a price to pay for making law enforcement more efficient.

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around ‘max black’ after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining ‘bleached’ districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.

It makes sense to have cameras in places where terrorism and crime are of particular concern – such as in Times Square or near major bridges and tunnels. It would be more troubling to learn, however, that the government has focused cameras on the front doors of our homes just to keep track of our comings and goings.

It’s tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.

It is one thing to say that there is a constitutional right to keep a gun at home for protection. It is quite another to say there is a constitutional right to bring a hidden gun into a daycare center.