Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“I was tremendously fortunate to be alive and a lawyer, working at a university so I had more flexible hours, when the women's movement was coming alive and when it became possible to argue s...”

“All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the pow...”

“One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn't the rig...”

“The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.”

“Whatever final judgment awaits 'Bush v. Gore' in the annals of history, I am certain that the good work and good faith of the U.S. federal judiciary as a whole will continue to sustain publi...”

“If you just needed the skills to pass the bar, two years would be enough. But if you think of law as a learned profession, then a third year is an opportunity for, on the one hand, public se...”

“When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solut...”

“I'm a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.”

“When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn't reali...”

“I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.”

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment as a lawyer when I earned my degree.”

“The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document ess...”

“We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographica...”

“Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”

“A gender line... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

“Ever since my colorectal cancer in 1999, I have been followed by the N.I.H. That was very lucky for me because they detected my pancreatic cancer at a very early stage.”

“After the pancreatic cancer, at first I went to N.I.H. every three months, then every four months, then every six months.”

“I've had two cancer bouts in my years on the Court, and the first one, Justice O'Connor told me, 'Now, you do the chemotherapy on Friday because you'll get over it during the weekend and you...”

“Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.”

“Feminism... I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, 'Free to be You and Me.'”