Sonia Sotomayor

“Diabetes taught me discipline.”

“I found in my experiences that it's not that men are consciously discriminating against promoting women, but I do believe as people we have self-images about what's good.”

“I think it's important to move people beyond just dreaming into doing. They have to be able to see that you are just like them, and you made it.”

“If your child marches to a different beat, a different drummer, you might just have to go along with that music. Help them achieve what's important to them.”

“We educated, privileged lawyers have a professional and moral duty to represent the underrepresented in our society, to ensure that justice exists for all, both legal and economic justice.”

“We have to look and ensure that we're paying attention to what we're doing, so that we don't reflexively institute processes and procedures that exclude people without thought.”

“The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thi...”

“My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my j...”

“I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me, they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.”

“If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it. I have faith in the process of the law, and if it is carried out fairly, I can live with the results, whatever t...”

“My judicial philosophy is fidelity to the law.”

“Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in H...”

“I have never, ever focused on the negative of things. I always look at the positive.”

“The Latina in me is an ember that blazes forever.”

“I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.”

“To have a romance, you have to have time. I'm a justice. I've written a book. The guy's gonna have to wait until I'm a little bit freer.”

“You know, failure hurts. Any kind of failure stings. If you live in the sting, you will - undoubtedly - fail. My way of getting past the sting is to say no, I'm just not going to let this ge...”

“I realized that people had an unreal image of me, that somehow I was a god on Mount Olympus. I decided that if I were going to make use of my role as a Supreme Court Justice, it would be to...”

“All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.”

“It is very important when you judge to recognize that you have to stay impartial. That's what the nature of my job is. I have to unhook myself from my emotional responses and try to stay wit...”