Notorious RBG Quotes

“The adoring portrayal of an older woman like RBG as both fierce and knowing, points out the feminist author Rebecca Traister, is “a crucial expansion of the American imagination with regard to powerful women.” For too long, Traister says, older women have been reduced in our cultural consciousness to “nanas, bubbes” or “ballbusters, nutcrackers, and bitches.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“That January day, on an empty stomach and with Brooklyn vowels still in her voice, RBG spoke for ten minutes without a single interruption from the justices. She had stunned them into silence.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“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

“BUT PICK YOUR BATTLES RBG survived the indignities of pre-feminist life mostly by deciding that anger was counterproductive. “This wonderful woman whose statue I have in my chambers, Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy,” RBG says. “They’re not productive and don’t get you anyplace, so get over it.’” To be like RBG in dissent, save your public anger for when there’s lots at stake and when you’ve tried everything else.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“None of these problems were new. What was new was that anyone thought it was worth it to complain about it.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Royal Canadian Air Force exercise plan,”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG Young Readers' Edition: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Only a woman’s body showed proof of having sex, and only women were punished for having it.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“If involuntary discharge of a woman solely on the ground of her pregnancy is not sex discrimination, nothing is!”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Killing the Voting Rights Act because it had worked too well, she had added, was like 'throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
― 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.”
― 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. Early in her career, RBG wanted to work at a law firm, maybe teach a little. The world as it was had no room for her. That injustice left her no choice but to achieve bombshells. It was easy to miss, maybe because it didn’t look like male bomb throwing.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“asked by Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times about the fact that in that same term, the number of female clerks fell to single digits for the first time in more than a decade. Only seven women would be among the thirty-seven clerks, and two of them were working for RBG. Why not ask a justice who had hired no women? suggested RBG. That would be Alito, Souter, Scalia, and Thomas.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Her father, Nathan, worried about Kiki wanting to be a lawyer. So few women had made it. How would she support herself? He had reason to relent by the time she was a senior. His Kiki had, by then, found a good man to support her. She herself did not see it that way. Kiki was just happy that Marty Ginsburg, one year ahead of her at Cornell, was the first boy she ever met who cared that she had a brain.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“The people closest to RBG find her entrance to the zeitgeist hilarious, if perplexing. “It’s hard for me to think of someone less likely to care about being a cult figure,” says David Schizer, a former RBG clerk and now a friend.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Her every utterance is clickbait, and according to the headlines, she no longer says anything, but rather “eviscerates.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“I just try to do the good job that I have to the best of my ability, and I really don’t think about whether I’m inspirational. I just do the best I can.” —RBG,”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Marshall had died five months earlier and could not be reached for comment.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. . . .”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Her “feminist friends,” she said, have asked why Scalia, a man, got to sit in the front. “It had to do with the distribution of weight,” RBG deadpanned.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“A FULLY ADULT HUMAN, RESPONSIBLE FOR HER OWN CHOICES”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Decisions of this Court that span a century have contributed to this anomaly: presumably well-meaning exaltation of woman’s unique role in bearing children has, in effect, restrained women from developing their individual talents and capacities and has impelled them to accept a dependent, subordinate status in society.”
― 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.” In”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Ruth, if you don’t want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you,” Morris said. “But if you really want to go to law school, you will stop feeling sorry for yourself. You will find a way.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Celia’s instructions would remain carved in her daughter’s memory. Ruth was to always be a lady. “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way,” RBG later explained. “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect, be a good teacher, but don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” 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

“April 18, 2007: RBG launches her era of furious dissent with the abortion case Gonzales v. Carhart.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When you say you have ‘no available graduates’ whom you could recommend for appointment as my clerk, do you include women? It is possible I may decide to take one, if I can find one who is absolutely first-rate.” —Justice William O. Douglas, 1944”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Women lose power with age, and men gain it.”
― 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. Those”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“What Wiesenfeld meant by “alternative,” and what was hinted by RBG’s use of the phrase life partner was a marriage in which the woman didn’t lose herself and her autonomy, in which two humans shared their lives and goals on equal footing.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“least he had taken that half step. RBG wrote of the case, “Wiesenfeld is part of an evolution toward a policy of neutrality—a policy that will accommodate traditional patterns, but at the same time, one that requires removal of artificial constraints so that men and women willing to explore their full potential as humans may create new traditions by their actions.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg