RUTH BADER GINSBURG WISDOM AND MORE

[Barbara]

"I read Simone de Beauvoir's 'Second Sex' and that was an eye-opener. So I began to think, well the law could catch up with changes in society, and that was an empowering idea...."

[Barbara]

"The notion was that law was, yes, a way to earn a living, but also to do things that would make life a little better for your community."

[Barbara]

"Generally, change in our society is incremental, I think. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time."

[Barbara]

"My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do."

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

"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."

[Barbara]

"Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true."

[Barbara]

"We are living in an age in which the fundamental principles to which we subscribe - liberty, equality, and justice for all - are encountering extraordinary challenges...."

[Barbara]

"....But it is also an age in which we can join hands with others who hold to those principles and face similar challenges."

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

“A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.”

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

“I am a judge born, raised, and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand."

[Barbara]

“A constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom.”

[Barbara]

“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.”

[Barbara]

“Promoting active liberty does not mean allowing the majority to run roughshod over minorities. It calls for taking special care that all groups have a chance to fully participate in society and the political process.”

[Barbara]

“I think the side that wants to take the choice away from women and give it to the state, they’re fighting a losing battle. Time is on the side of change.”

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

“Anger, resentment, envy, and self-pity are wasteful reactions. They greatly drain one’s time. They sap energy better devoted to productive endeavors.”

[Barbara]

“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.”

[Barbara]

"When contemplated in its extreme, almost any power looks dangerous.”

[Barbara]

“I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.”

[Barbara]

“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.’”

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

“The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting.”

[Barbara]

“My dissenting opinions, like my briefs, are intended to persuade. And sometimes one must be forceful about saying how wrong the Court’s decision is.”

[Barbara]

“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.”

[Barbara]

“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.”

[Barbara]

“I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability.”

[Barbara]

"It is true, as Jeanne Coyne of Minnesota's Supreme Court famously said: at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman will reach the same decision. But it is also true that women, like persons of different racial groups and ethnic origins, contribute what the late Fifth Circuit Judge Alvin Rubin described as “a distinctive medley of views influenced by differences in biology, cultural impact, and life experience.”

[Barbara]

"Our system of justice is surely richer for the diversity of background and experience of its judges. It was poorer when nearly all of its participants were cut from the same mold.”

[Barbara]

"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!'

[Barbara]

“In 1869 Iowa’s Arabella Mansfield became the first female to gain admission to the practice of law in this country.”

[Barbara]

“Belva Ann Lockwood born in 1830 was the first woman ever to gain admission to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bar."

[Barbara]

“We should not be held back from pursuing our full talents, from contributing what we could contribute to the society, because we fit into a certain mold ― because we belong to a group that historically has been the object of discrimination.”

[Barbara]

“I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don’t think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are. I think that it is great that we are beginning to use the talents of all of the people, in all walks of life, and that we no longer have the closed doors that we once had.”

[Barbara]

"I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability."

[Barbara]

"If you want to be a true professional, do something outside yourself."

[Barbara]

After her male colleagues appeared indifferent about a girl's strip-search by school administrators

"They have never been a 13-year-old girl."

[Barbara]

“Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.”

[Barbara]

"He is a faker," Ginsburg said about Trump. "He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. ... How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that."

[Bill]

Barbara wrote: ""He is a faker," Ginsburg said about Trump. "He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. ... How has he gotten away with not turning o..."

Yup...

[Barbara]

“It is beyond rational belief that H. B. 2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law ‘would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions.’ When a state severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners ... at great risk to their health and safety.”

[Barbara]

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

[Barbara]

“We children of public school age can do much to aid in the promotion of peace. We must try to train ourselves and those about us to live together with one another as good neighbors for this idea is embodied in the great new Charter of the United Nations. It is the only way to secure the world against future wars and maintain an everlasting peace.”

[Barbara]

“It’s an unconscious bias. It’s the expectation. You have a lowered expectation when you hear a woman speaking, I think that still goes on. That instinctively when a man speaks, he will be listened to, where people will not expect the woman to say anything of value. But all of the women in my generation have had, time and again, that experience where you say something at a meeting, and nobody makes anything of it. And maybe half an hour later, a man makes the identical point, and people react to it and say, ‘Good idea.’ That, I think, is a problem that persists.”