Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Page 2

I will do this job as long as I feel that I can do it full steam.

I do a variety of weight-lifting, elliptical glider, stretching exercises, push-ups.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,' but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.

It won't happen. It would be an impossible dream. But I'd love to see 'Citizens United' overruled.

When police or prosecutors conceal significant exculpatory or impeaching material, we hold, it is ordinarily incumbent on the state to set the record straight.

In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

If you just needed the skills to pass the bar, two years would be enough. But if you think of law as a learned profession, then a third year is an opportunity for, on the one hand, public service and practice experience, but on the other, also to take courses that round out the law that you didn't have time to do.

Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court.

I think we understand that for the Court to work well, we have to not only respect but genuinely like each other.

You would have a huge statelessness problem if you don't consider a child born abroad a U.S. citizen.

The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.

Ever since my colorectal cancer in 1999, I have been followed by the N.I.H. That was very lucky for me because they detected my pancreatic cancer at a very early stage.

The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

My biographers... would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided... to flip the order.

I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don't share that belief.

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship, and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say, 'We want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.'

Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.

It is not like I have gone crazy, I just don't want to take any chances. You never know what could happen.

I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman's equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling.

I would not like to be the only woman on the court.

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn't realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.

Justice Scalia and I served together on the D.C. Circuit. So his votes are not surprising to me. What I like about him is that he's very funny and very smart.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

I was the first tenured woman at Columbia. That was 1972; every law school was looking for its woman. Why? Because Stan Pottinger, who was then head of the office for civil rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was enforcing the Nixon government contract program.

There's nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

Our goal in the '70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It's called 'Scalia/Ginsburg.' The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.

I was a super once - an extra - in 'Die Fledermaus,' and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case, it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.

I don't think that a Justice should have uppermost in her mind, 'A Democratic president appointed me, so I must leave to be sure that another Democratic president can appoint my successor.'

In the '50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

It's hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn't have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

After the pancreatic cancer, at first I went to N.I.H. every three months, then every four months, then every six months.

'Whole Women's Health' made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

I don't see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn't the right one.

We had to go on and do the work of the court and we did.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

I'm sure I've changed my mind about something. Inevitably, when we grow up - as we get more experience and wiser. Well, I've changed my mind about some food that I didn't like when I was young.

On the whole, we think of our consumers - other judges, lawyers, the public. The law that the Supreme Court establishes is the law that they must live by, so all things considered, it's better to have it clearer than confusing.

The experience I don't want to see repeated occurred in 'Bush v. Gore.' The Court divided five to four. There were four separate dissents, and that confused the press. In fact, some of the reporters announced that the decision was seven-two. There was no time to get together.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don't have executions.

My mother graduated from high school at 15 and went to work to support the family because the eldest son went to college.

My resume showed membership on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews, a credit impressive abroad where it was not generally known that Law Reviews were student-operated publications.

I think Mozart's operas 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

I was tremendously fortunate to be alive and a lawyer, working at a university so I had more flexible hours, when the women's movement was coming alive and when it became possible to argue successfully for a view of the equal protection clause that included women.

I can't imagine what this place would be - I can't imagine what the country would be - with Donald Trump as our president.

The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can't get out the vote in the midterm elections.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the '80s and '90s.

I think a law clerk told me about this tumblr and also explained to me what Notorious RBG was a parody on. And now my grandchildren love it, and I try to keep abreast of the latest that's on the tumblr.