Notorious RBG Quotes

“Someday, we will go back to having the kind of legislature that we should, where members, whatever party they belong to, want to make the thing work and cooperate with each other to see that that will happen.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Anyway, hope springs eternal. If I lose today, there’s hope that tomorrow will be better.” —RBG, 2012”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels,” the president said. “Having experienced discrimination,” he added, “she devoted the next twenty years of her career to fighting it and making this country a better place for our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters.” RBG would have added, “And our husbands, our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Generally, change in our society is incremental, I think. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Suddenly, she felt the ground steady under her. These men, the most important judges in the country, were her captive audience for the next ten minutes. RBG knew so much more about the case and the topic than they did. She had to teach them. She knew how to do that. RBG had been teaching law for almost a decade.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“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

“August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“As we live, we can learn,”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“My mother-in-law meant simply this,” RBG said. “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

“When RBG fretted over the first dry opinion the chief justice assigned her, O'Connor gave her a pep talk. As RBG read that opinion on the bench, O'Connor, who had dissented in the case, passed her a note. "This is your first opinion for the Court," she had written. "It is a fine one, I look forward to many more." Remembering the comfort that note gave her on such a nerve wracking day, RBG did the same for the next two women to join the court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

“Her time was almost up. 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

“She is painstaking in presenting facts, on the theory that the truth is weapon enough.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG saw injustice in the world and she used her abilities to help change it.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Read closely, it very gently suggested the majority was being a bunch of arrogant hypocrites, who had checked their commitment to states’ rights at the door when it served the Republican party.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Present the court with the next logical step,”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“He’s never been in awe of anybody. He wooed and won her by convincing her how much he respected her.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“For decades, some feminists had said the solution was an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, which would read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” This amendment, known as the ERA, had been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923, but each time it had been held up in committee.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” —Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Thanks to the competition for the spots reserved for women, RBG remembered, “The women were a heck of a lot smarter than the men.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“I very much want to be considered on the basis of whatever merit I have, not on the basis of my sex.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She wrote that she was pretty sure more women and people of color could enroll “without denying to white men of merit a fair chance to compete for places.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“It turned out there was something Marty did a little better. It all started with tuna casserole, or at least something RBG called tuna casserole. At Fort Sill one night, right after they were married, she dutifully presented the dish. That was her job, after all, or one of them. Marty squinted at the lumpy mass. “What is it?” And then he taught himself how to cook. The Escoffier cookbook had been a wedding gift from RBG’s cousin Richard. The legendary French chef had made his name at hotels like the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. It was not exactly everyday fare for two young working parents on a military base in Oklahoma. But Marty found that his chemistry skills came in handy, and he began working his way through the book. Photograph by Mariana Cook made at the Ginsburgs’ home in 1998 Still, for years, the daily cooking was still RBG’s reluctant territory. Her repertoire involved thawing a frozen vegetable and some meat. “I had seven things I could make,” RBG said, “and when we got to number seven, we went back to number one.” Jane isn’t sure she saw a fresh vegetable until she was sent to France the summer she turned fourteen. Around that time, she decided, as RBG put it to me, “that Mommy should be phased out of the kitchen altogether.” RBG cooked her last meal in 1980. The division of labor in the family, Jane would say, developed into this: “Mommy does the thinking and Daddy does the cooking.” Growing up, James says, he got used to people asking him what his father did for a living, when his mother did something pretty interesting too.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“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

“Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“This is my dream of the way the world should be.’ When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated,”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“I’m going to tell you the secret of a happy marriage: It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” In her outstretched hand were a pair of earplugs.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy. They’re not productive and don’t get you anyplace, so get over it.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG Young Readers' Edition: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“If only the court had acted more slowly,’ RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had ‘halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue. (85).”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg