Conversations with RBG Quotes

“My mother’s advice was, don’t lose time on useless emotions like anger, resentment, remorse, envy. Those, she said, will just sap time; they don’t get you where you want to be.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“For Ginsburg, therefore, the #MeToo movement, in which women used social media and other platforms to demand the same respect in the workplace as their male colleagues, was a vindication of her vision that women should empower themselves by joining the workplace in numbers and refusing to tolerate unequal treatment, intentional or unintentional. Ginsburg believes that the Constitution should be interpreted to root out unconscious biases that subordinate women. But as she recognized decades ago, true equality requires that men and women work together to root out unconscious bias in families and in the workplace.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“The idea was there from the beginning: equality. And yet you can read every page of your pocket Constitution and you will not find, in the original Constitution, the word equal, or equality, even though equality was a main theme of the Declaration of Independence. The word equal becomes a part of the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“By the way, I said my affirmative action plan would be for men as teachers in kindergarten and grade schools. I think it would be wonderful for children, if they could see men in caring roles just as they see women.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“If we imagine the worst-case scenario, with Roe v. Wade overruled, there would remain many states that would not go back to the way it once was. It doesn’t matter what Congress or the state legislatures do, there will be other states that provide this facility, and women will have access to it if they can pay for it. Women who can’t pay are the only women who would be affected.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“From her days as an advocate to her days as a justice, Ginsburg insisted that men and women would be truly equal only when they took equal responsibility for child rearing. She wrote as early as 1972 that “child rearing, as distinguished from child bearing, does not involve a physical characteristic unique to one sex,”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“So, my objective was to take the Court step by step to the realization, in Justice Brennan’s words, that the pedestal on which some thought women were standing all too often turned out to be a cage.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Changes for the better. The most important is that we are now using the talent of all of the people, not just half of them.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“By not taking no for an answer. If you have a dream, something you want to pursue, and you’re willing to do the work that’s necessary to make the dream come true, don’t let anyone tell you, you can’t do it. And you have, nowadays, many like-minded people to join you in opposing unfair treatment, treatment of you as less than a full citizen.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Just think how you would like the women in your family to be treated, particularly your daughters. And when you see men behaving in ways they should not, you should tell them this is improper behavior.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“judges should generally uphold laws passed by majorities that favor minorities, unless there is strong evidence that the political process is not working.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Ginsburg maintained that restrictions on abortion are best understood not as a private matter between women and their male doctors; instead, the restrictions violate women’s constitutional right to equality by limiting their ability to define their own life choices, imposing burdens that are not imposed on men.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Well, emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive. They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Our argument: don’t stereotype people because they are male or because they are female. Recognizing that the stereotype might well be true for the vast majority of people, but there are people who don’t fit the mold, and they should be allowed to make choices, to live their lives without being pigeonholed because of their sex.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will be truly liberated.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“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.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“In my long life, I have seen many changes. Changes for the better. The most important is that we are not using the talent of all the people, not just half of them.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“The Court is the guardian of the Bill of Rights, and it should see to it that Congress remembers that Congress is to pass no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“RBG: The Declaration is our first statement of the idea of equality, though that great statement, “all [persons] are created equal,” was penned by a slave owner.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“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.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“To go back to Brown, a concern the United States government had was definitely part of the picture. At that time, we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the State Department filed a brief in Brown v. Board urging the Court to end what was basically apartheid in America. It said, we are being embarrassed constantly by the Soviet Union charging that the United States is a racist society. Please, Court, help us to end that era.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Ginsburg argued that if the Supreme Court in 1973 had simply struck down the Texas law at issue in the case and had resisted the temptation to impose a national framework for abortion, the case might have inspired less of a backlash, allowing a growing number of state legislatures to recognize a right to reproductive choice on their own. What her feminist critics in the 1990s failed to appreciate was that Ginsburg was laying the groundwork for a firmer constitutional foundation for reproductive choice, one rooted in women’s equality rather than the right to privacy.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Well, emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive. They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control. In the days when I was a flaming feminist litigator, I never said to judges who asked improper questions, “You sexist pig.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“She viewed her advocacy not as a crusade for abstract principles but as a fight for justice for individual men and women disadvantaged by laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“What must young people do to preserve the values of justice and freedom and democracy? RBG: They must work together. Many of them are.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“If an unkind word is said, you just tune out.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“Dear, in every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“And so that's my ideal: a child should have two caring parents, and if every child could grow up with a father and a mother, both of whom love and care for the child, ours would be a much better world.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“This theme of the rise of populism around the West is crucial. Are you concerned that we’re seeing the rise of the kind of demagogues the Founders feared? RBG: Yes. JR: Social media is part of that? RBG: Yes, and an important part is the discontent seen among people who feel that our institutions of government pay no attention to them, as illustrated by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. JR: Fixing democracy is a task bigger than any of us. But what are some things that could be done? RBG: One key thing is to teach children about democracy. They don’t learn about it in school as they did in civics classes when I was young. By the way, did you see the show What the Constitution Means to Me? JR: Not yet, but I know you did see it. What did you think? RBG: I loved it. At the end of the second act, a teenager comes on stage to take part in the conversation about the Constitution. Two young women alternate in that role. The older one, age eighteen, played the role the night I attended. She just graduated from high school, and I will stay in touch with her. I was uplifted by those young women. JR: What is uplifting about them? What’s the message of the play? RBG: The play begins with a young woman who wins American Legion competitions, by spouting rosy things about the Constitution. Then, she questions whether the Constitution is as protective as she portrayed it in her youth. At the end, she puts the question to the audience: Should we keep it or should we do it over? Our audience voted overwhelmingly to keep it, and it’s been overwhelmingly that way for most audiences. JR: Why are people moved to keep it? And why should we keep it? RBG: What reason is there to think we would do better if we started over from scratch?”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law

“So someone got the even brighter idea to put up a curtain between the people who are auditioning and the judges. And that simple device almost overnight led to women showing up in symphony orchestras in numbers.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law