Notorious RBG Quotes

“The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity,” she said simply. “It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“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.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: 'When there are nine.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“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.” —RBG”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,” she said, “I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.” The mantra in her chambers is “Get it right and keep it tight.” She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. “If you can say it in plain English, you should,” RBG says. Going through “innumerable drafts,” the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. “I think that law should be a literary profession,” RBG says, “and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“IRIN: And when the time comes, what would you like to be remembered for?       RBG: Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. —MSNBC interview, 2015”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“So when RBG was asked how she had managed to have such an extraordinary marriage, she often answered by saying that Marty himself was extraordinary, and he saw the same in her.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“One of the first things many clerks hear from RBG is that the most important job requirement is that they treat her two secretaries well. ‘There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,’ RBG recalled. ‘As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG looked the justices in the eye and quoted Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny,” RBG said. “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.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Actually, there is no biological connection whatsoever between the function of giving birth to and nursing a child and the function of washing its clothes, preparing its food, and trying to bring it up to be a good and harmonious person,” Moberg wrote. “Both men and women have one main role: that of being human beings.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me. It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.” —Marty Ginsburg, 1993”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“As of this writing, no one has come up with a male counterpart to “schoolmarmish.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG’s old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice’s image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem’s own long-standing observation: “Women lose power with age, and men gain it.” Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“6/17/10 My dearest Ruth—You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!! I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.
Marty
-- Handwritten letter from Marty to Ruth”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“The study of law was unusual for women of my generation. For most girls growing up in the 1940s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S.” —RBG”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG has never been one to shrink from a challenge. People who think she is hanging on to this world by a thread underestimate her. RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG's black robe, it's bad news for liberals. That's her dissent collar.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG’s longtime friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein says, “I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Law should be a literary profession,' RGB says, 'and the best legal practioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg