Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes

In the course of a marriage, one accommodates the other.

I am fearful, or suspicious, of generalizations… They cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.

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

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

I was a proponent of the ERA.

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.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that’s been discriminated against, knows what it’s like.

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.

A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

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.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.

I really concentrate on what’s on my plate at the moment and do the very best I can.

Whatever final judgment awaits ‚Bush v. Gore‘ in the annals of history, I am certain that the good work and good faith of the U.S. federal judiciary as a whole will continue to sustain public confidence at a level never beyond repair.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

If I had any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.

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

Dissents speak to a future age.

I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.

I’m a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

All I can say is I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.

The Sixth Amendment secures to persons charged with crime the right to be tried by an impartial jury reflecting a fair cross-section of the community.

My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, ‚We, the people.‘

I’ve had two cancer bouts in my years on the Court, and the first one, Justice O’Connor told me, ‚Now, you do the chemotherapy on Friday because you’ll get over it during the weekend and you can be back in court on Monday.‘

Collegiality is crucial to the success of our mission. We could not do the job the Constitution assigns to us if we didn’t – to use one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s favorite expressions – ‚Get over it!‘

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

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.

Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

It is not women’s liberation, it is women’s and men’s liberation.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

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.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

It’s a facet of the gay rights movement that people don’t think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn’t until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana’s ‚head and master rule,‘ that the husband was head and master of the house.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe are not going to change back. So we have a policy that only affects poor women, and it can never be otherwise.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

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

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.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be ‚Citizens United.‘ I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

I thought ‚Heller‘ was a very bad decision.

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.

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

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, ‚You don’t know how to use the English language,‘ or ‚How could you make that argument?‘ It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive.

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

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

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.