Notorious RBG Quotes

“RBG’s most famous words in the Hobby Lobby dissent could have appeared in any of her searing dissents: “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG has never been very interested in drawing attention to herself without a good reason. That’s how you know that when she does send up smoke signals, something has gone very wrong.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When she left the library, RBG knew this much: Her days of quiet acceptance were over.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“There’s full marriage and then there’s sort of skim milk marriage.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“1963: RBG becomes the second woman to teach full-time at Rutgers School of Law.   “[The dean explained] it was only fair to pay me modestly, because my husband had a very good job.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG would “widely be seen as the most independent, thoughtful, modest judge on the bench.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“One is to seek ever more the joys of being alive, because who knows how much longer I will be living? At my age, one must take things day by day.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Always be a lady: “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way. . . . Don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect.” Last but definitely not least: always be independent.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG Young Readers' Edition: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG knew this much: Her days of quiet acceptance were over. That included accepting Rutgers’s giving her the ladies’ discount. RBG helped the other female professors file a federal class-action pay-discrimination claim against the university. They won.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“got the idea that being a lawyer was a pretty good thing,” RBG recalled, “because in addition to practicing a profession, you could do something good for your society.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Her guests asked her what message she had for all the young people who admired her. RBG paused to think it over. “You can tell them,” she replied, “I’ll be back doing push-ups next week.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“this, she is by no means a bomb thrower,” he insisted. “But,” said Peratis, “the things she achieved were bombshells.” Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“In the late seventies, RBG was interviewed for a book called Women Lawyers at Work, which devoted many paragraphs to her work-life balance. The author, Elinor Porter Swiger, seemed eager to find her subject torn or in crisis. Swiger noted that Jane had once rebelliously announced she was going to be a stay-at-home mom like Evelyn Ginsburg. And Swiger pressed RBG for her reaction to a terrifying incident when James was two and a housekeeper found him screaming, with Drano on his lips. RBG vividly described rushing to the hospital: “Deep burns distorted his face, charred lips encircled his mouth—a tiny, burnt-out cavern ravaged by the lye.” Swiger wondered: “How did Ruth feel during this prolonged ordeal? As a working mother, did she agonize with regret that she had not been there when it happened? The answer is a qualified ‘yes.’” Then RBG paused to consider it. She said the real mistake had been “not putting the Drano out of the toddler’s reach.” Swiger wrote, not entirely admiringly, “It is a part of Ruth Ginsburg’s success that she can view this incident in a relatively objective way.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“From the outside, neither Ginsburg seemed like anyone’s version of “alternative.” In New York, they had lived on the posh Upper East Side, on East Sixty-Ninth Street, and sent their children to Dalton and Brearley, private schools for the city’s elite. Marty used to sardonically describe his work as having been “devoted to protecting the deservedly rich from the predations of the poor and downtrodden.” On weekends, they golfed.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. 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.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“might come up about “bias based on experiences.” A list of qualities RBG drew up to describe herself sold the star litigator rather short. It focused not on her brilliant strategy or accomplishments but on her “high capacity for sustained work—accustomed to long hours, homework, extending day as long as necessary to accomplish task needed to be done.” She bloodlessly referred to her “high quality standards for own work product” (“my own sternest critic”) and put near the bottom that she was a “good (sympathetic) listener.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“No doubt could be read on Clinton’s face that afternoon. He introduced RBG as a hero to the women’s movement and a legal star. Above all, Clinton said, he’d chosen her for being a moderate, neither liberal nor conservative, someone whose “moral imagination has cooled the fires of her colleagues’ discord. “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

“I think that the most important thing I have done is enable Ruth to do what she has done.”
― 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.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Do I want this or not? And if I do, I’ll do it.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

“sacrifice; it’s family.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“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. She wrote to advise the lawyer of a pregnant servicewoman who had gotten a general discharge instead of an honorable one. “Surely the less than honorable aspect is not ‘getting pregnant’ but the conduct,” RBG wrote. “As for that, it takes two, and no man (or no woman, probably) is discharged for having sexual relations.” The Supreme Court stubbornly refused to listen to any of this.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“People often ask me, ‘Well, did you always want to be a judge?’ My answer is it just wasn’t in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president and was determined to draw on the talent of all of the people, not just some of them.” —RBG, 2010”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Men need to learn, and they do when women show up in their midst in numbers, not as one-at-a-time curiosities,” RBG remarked at the twenty-fifth anniversary of women at Harvard Law School in 1978. “Men need the experience of working with women who demonstrate a wide range of personality characteristics, they need to become working friends with women.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG firmly believed that for women to be equal, men had to be free. Decades later, an unnamed guest at a dinner party told the New York Times that RBG had fiercely interrupted another guest who mentioned she’d worked on behalf of “women’s liberation.” “She turned on him and said, ‘It is not women’s liberation; it is women’s and men’s liberation.’ I’d never seen her exercise such strength and vehemence.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg