Most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they've been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see - not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition.
— Vincent Bugliosi
We're a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren't, such as John Wayne: a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood.
Our system, for readily apparent reasons, is far superior to those in nations, mostly totalitarian, which presume an arrested person is guilty and place the burden on the accused to prove his innocence.
The question in the Simpson case has never been whether he is guilty or not guilty but, given the facts and circumstances of this case, whether it is possible for him to be innocent. And the answer to that question has always been an unequivocal no.
The very best testament to the validity of the Warren Commission's findings is that after an unrelenting, close to forty-five-year effort, the Commission's fiercest critics have not been able to produce any new credible evidence that would in any way justify a different conclusion.
In my opinion, the Warren Commission's investigation has to be considered the most comprehensive investigation of a crime in history.
Though there are some notable exceptions, by and large the persistent ranting of the Warren Commission critics, some of whom were screaming the word 'conspiracy' before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, came to remind me, as H. L. Mencken said in a different context, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.
Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.
'Helter-Skelter' was the motive for the murders. Manson borrowed that term from a Beatles song on the 'White Album.' In England, helter-skelter is a playground ride. To Manson, helter-skelter meant a war between whites and blacks that the Beatles were in favor of.
Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.
Although I've been a longtime Democrat (primarily because, unless there is some very compelling reason to be otherwise, I am always for 'the little guy'), my political orientation is not rigid. For instance, I supported John McCain's run for the presidency in 2000.
I've actually had a copilot come out of the cockpit on a trip from L.A. to New York and ask me about Charles Manson.
I, for one, can't be sure at all there is a God.
I lost court cases and misdemeanor juries, but of felony jury trials I was successful 105 of 106 times.
I'm still angry with Simpson for getting by with two murders.
If you're honest with yourself, you're going to find out whether you truly love America, or whether your primary allegiance is to the Republican party.
It's unbelievable, there's a book out attacking Gore, when he's the most unfortunate loser in political history.
If there is one thing that I take pride in, it is the fact that I never, ever make a charge without offering a substantial amount of support for it. You may ultimately end up not agreeing with me, but you will have to concede that I offered much evidence in support of my position, something that people frequently do not do.
The reality is that most celebrity defendants are extremely unknowledgeable, naive, and vulnerable, and if they get into trouble, they usually call their lawyer friends who handle criminal cases, and if they don't know any, they call their business lawyers, who then refer them to lawyer friends of theirs.
I take no pride in having been the first public personality to come out publicly against Simpson. It just happened that way.
One thing I have seen over and over again in life is that there is virtually no correlation between intelligence and common sense. IQ doesn't seem to translate that way.
As a trial lawyer in front of a jury and an author of true-crime books, credibility has always meant everything to me. My only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others.
Over a hundred million Americans reject the findings of the Warren Commission, whose report at least ninety-nine out of a hundred have never read.
Nearly all Americans felt they knew JFK intimately, his charm and wit regularly lighting up the television screen at home. This is why polls showed that millions of Americans took his assassination like a 'death in the family.'
When I hear theists and atheists pontificating on how they know God does or does not exist, I can only smile at the irrationality and, yes, vanity of the notion.
I believe that the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension.
I am more excited about 'Divinity of Doubt: The God Question' than any other book in my entire career, and I've had seven New York Times bestsellers, three of them reaching number one.
We should not televise trials. There's only one purpose for a criminal trial. It's to determine whether or not the defendant committed the crime. Anything that interferes or has the potential of interfering with that should automatically be prohibited.
If anyone should be executed, it should be Charles Manson. Do I go around during the daytime, 'Geez, I'm upset that he's alive'? No, I don't even think about him. I don't think about this case.
No matter what I do, I'll be forever known as the Manson prosecutor.
I think I present an overwhelming case that these five justices were up to no good, and they deliberately set out to hand the election to George Bush.
I'm trying to finish my book on the Kennedy assassination.
It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story.
The felonious five in their Supreme Court decision never said Gore did anything improperly in Florida.
As a trial lawyer, intelligence is important only in the sense that it allows you to play the game, if you will. Without it, you don't even have a ticket into the competitive arena. But beyond that, it doesn't get you very far at all.
I start out with the assumption that a lawyer in a criminal case is going to be incompetent - substantially so. I find my assumption to be rarely wrong. Yet society starts out with the very opposite assumption.
Contrary to common belief, the presumption of innocence applies only inside a courtroom. It has no applicability elsewhere, although the media do not seem to be aware of this.
All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society.
A tactic used by authors of virtually every single book I've ever read that propounds a conspiracy theory is to attack an agency as being part of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, but when this same agency comes up with something favorable to the author's position, the author will cite that same agency as credible support for his argument.
Even if a sense of honor and duty were not the primary motivating factors in the Warren Commission's work, simple self-interest would naturally have induced its members not to try to cover up the existence of a conspiracy if, in fact, they found one.
Since Kennedy's death, the nation has not seen, in any of his successors, his cosmopolitan intellectualism or the oratorical eloquence with which he sought to lead the nation by the power of his words.
For the life of me, I still don't understand why humans pray.
We can know that the Christian God cannot exist. If he is all-powerful and all-good, as Christians maintain, there would not have been, for instance, the Holocaust. This is an inherent self-contradiction. So if Christians insist on having a God, they can do so, but if they have any respect for logic they'll have to redefine who he is.
This book here, 'The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,' in it, I put together a case against George Bush that could result - it absolutely could result in his being prosecuted for first-degree murder in an American courtroom.
I was at a book convention, in a cab. On one side of me was Arthur Schlesinger; on the other side was William Manchester - real heavyweights. All they were doing was asking me about Charles Manson. The only thing that enables me not to be bored is the people talking about it - they're so interested.
The very name 'Manson' has become a metaphor for evil... He has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, and for whatever reason, there is a side of human nature that is fascinated with ultimate evil.
A national legal organization is giving very serious thought to using The Betrayal of America as a legal basis for asking the House Judiciary Committee to institute impeachment proceedings against these five justices.
I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.
If it's a close election, then it's better for the Supreme Court to pick the president, whether or not he won the election. It's just insane on its face.
It's my view that any conservative who loves his country has to be extremely concerned.
