Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

“Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.”

RBG also understood that how pregnant women were treated had to do with sex. Only a woman’s body showed proof of having sex, and only women were punished for having it.

“I am fearful, or suspicious, of generalizations about the way women or men are. . . . They cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.”

Although the forces of “apathy, selfishness, or anxiety that one is already overextended” are “not easy to surmount,” as she puts it, RBG urges us “to repair tears in [our] communities, nation, and world, and in the lives of the poor, the forgotten, the people held back because they are members of disadvantaged or distrusted minorities.”