Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Page 4

Prisons should be co-ed because separate quarters are discriminatory.

One might plausibly contend that Congress violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it exonerates itself from the impositions of the laws it obligates people outside the legislature to obey.

The Second Amendment has a preamble about the need for a militia. Because there is a need for a militia to be at the ready, therefore the right to keep and bear arms must be secured.

Members of the legislature, people who have run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed

..the United States is subject to the scrutiny of a candid world ... what the United States does, for good or for ill, continues to be watched by the international community, in particular by organizations concerned with the advancement of the rule of law and respect for human dignity.

My own view, and I've said this many times, is as long as I can do the work full steam, I will stay on the Court. But when I feel myself slipping, when I slow down in my ability to write opinions with fair dispatch, when I forget the names of cases that I once could recite at the drop of a hat, I will know it is time for me to go.

I became a lawyer for selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other.

Work hard on each opinion, but once the case is decided, don't look back; go on to the next case and give it your all. It's not productive to worry about what's out and released, over and done. That's advice I now give to people new to the judging business.

You can't have it all, all at once. Who—man or woman—has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

As De Tocqueville said, sooner or later in the United States, every controversy ends up in court. I think that's a great - says great things about our judicial system.

We do not read (the law) to elevate accommodation of religious observances over an institution's need to maintain order and safety, ... We have no cause to believe that (the law) would not be applied in an appropriately balanced way, without sensitivity to security concerns.

My rule was I will not answer a question that attempts to project how I will rule in a case that might come before the court.

Legislators know much more about elections than the Court does.

If you ask judges, do you always agree on everything? Of course not, we divide just as you do. Why aren't you transparent about it? Because the people would begin to think that the law is not stable, the law is unclear. And that would not give them much faith in the law.

Every gal and every boy that's born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.

Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be 'perceived as favoring one religion over another,' the very 'risk the [Constitution's] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude.

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. And the stereotypical view of people of a world divided between home and child caring women and men as breadwinners, men representing the family outside the home.

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Undocumented aliens unfortunately are not protected by the law and they are tremendously subjected to exploitation. The result is that they would be willing to work for a wage that no person who is welcome in our shores would take.

Racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970.

Depriving a parent of parental status is as devastating as a criminal conviction.

I'm not very good at promotion.

In most civil law systems there are no dissents. There is a single opinion for the court: it is unanimous; it is highly stylized; you can't tell which judge wrote it.

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.

You're saying, no, state said two kinds of marriage; the full marriage, and then this sort of skim-milk marriage.