Justices Of The Supreme Court Of The United States

"...candidates for a Supreme Court seat that had opened up after Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement in early April. I settled on the brilliant young solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan"

"Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been a thorn in the side of American conservatives. She's been pilloried in the right-wing press by a range of so-called political experts, including college drop-out and shock jock Lars Larson, who publicly declared that Justice Ginsburg is "anti-American." Her stinging dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which recently granted corporations certain exceptions to the Affordable Care Act with regard to birth control coverage, has once again loosed the gates of extreme conservative rhetoric. One columnist in The Washington Times even crowned her "liberal bully of the week" even though hers was the dissenting, not majority, opinion."

"Well, there are all kind of hearts. There are bleeding hearts and there are hard hearts. And if I wanted to judge Justice Ginsburg on her heart, I might take a hard-hearted view of her and say she’s a bleeding heart. She represents the ACLU. She wants the age of consent to be 12. She believes there’s a constitutional right to prostitution. What kind of heart is that?"

"I guess where I am on this, if you look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I mean, she — the Ginsburg rule, she doesn’t have to answer specific questions, clearly pro-choice going in, thinks there may even be a constitutional right to polygamy, has a controversial view we should lower the age of consent to 12, supports legalized prostitution, very left-wing."

"Ginsburg cautioned against the idea of thinking that the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which declared abortion was a constitutional right, was enough to guarantee women's reproductive freedom. Ginsburg was a lifelong staunch advocate for abortion rights and gender equality, but from her early days she had criticised the Supreme Court's handling of the abortion issue. She believed that the Roe v Wade case had based the right to abortion on the wrong argument, a violation of a woman's privacy rather than on gender equality. This, she thought, left the ruling vulnerable to targeted legal attacks by anti-abortion activists. Ginsburg felt that because the ruling had legalised abortion overnight nationwide, it had failed to resolve the issue. It had the effect of halting the political process that had been moving to liberalise abortion already – with advocates now believing that right was secure – and instead mobilised the anti-abortion movement."

"Pedophilia is good for the children"

"I think performing Oscar the first time in Santa Fe is really what prompted me to look into proposing to my husband Scott, because it just seemed right. You know, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a huge advocate for Oscar and talked about in interviews. She came to the performances in Santa Fe and we were able to meet her and take photos with her. So it all just made sense: I think Prop 8 failed at that time, states started to make marriage legal, and it just all seemed right. So, yeah, we got married between the two runs of Oscar, and fortunately, Justice Ginsburg married us in D.C., which was such an honor. I still look back to that day and can’t really believe it! I asked her, and she said if I could come to Washington, D.C., she would be happy to do it."

"It helps sometimes to be a little deaf (in marriage and in) every workplace, including the good job I have now."

"Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation."

"This is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It’s a decision that she must make for herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices."

"She said, 'Dear, in every good marriage it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.' And I followed that advice in dealing not only with my dear spouse but in dealing even with my colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court.""

"The ACLU and the librarians appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay in order to allow the librarians to testify before Congress, which was debating reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act at that very moment. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declined to intervene."

"At the Supreme Court, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know."

"One of the things that happened after Roe v Wade is that women wanted women to be able to control their own destiny. They won, so they retreated. And the other side geared up and we have the situation that we have today."

"So the brunt of all these restrictive laws is on poor women. Not only if they can't pay the plane fare or the bus fare – they can't afford to take days off from work to go."

"Think back to 1787. Who were 'we the people'? … They certainly weren't women … they surely weren't people held in human bondage. The genius of our Constitution is that over now more than 200 sometimes turbulent years that 'we' has expanded and expanded."

"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."

"If you want to be a true professional, you will do something outside yourself, something to repair tears in your community, something to make life a little better for people less fortunate than you. That’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community."

"I have heard that there are some people on the Democratic side who would like to increase the number of judges. I think that was a bad idea... I am not at all in favor of that solution."

"I think society needs to be more active on this issue, I mean the truth is with all these restrictive laws, the only people who are being restricted are poor women. It's a little like divorce was in the old days, where if you had the money to go to Nevada and stay there for six weeks, you could get a divorce/ Now we have no-fault divorce in every state. So no woman of means will ever lack access to abortion in the US, because there are some states that will offer it," she said."

"The young people are my hope. Think of Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg. I think the young people I see are fired up and they want our country to be what it should be."

"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

"There's nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year."

"If the Senate is not acting, what can be done about it? Even if you could conceive of a testing lawsuit, what would the response be? 'Well, you want us to vote, so we'll vote no.' I do think cooler heads will prevail, I hope sooner rather than later. The president is elected for four years not three years, so the power he has in year three continues into year four. Maybe members of the Senate will wake up and appreciate that that's how it should be."

"Eight is not a good number for a collegial body that sometimes disagrees."

"My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent."

"We are at last beginning to relegate to the history books the idea of the token woman."

"To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community."

"The passing on and transformation of heritage and tradition-and the creation of ever new possibilities for women-are also exemplified in the life story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. When President Clinton announced the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993, pending Senate approval, Ginsburg accepted the nomination by expressing gratitude to "the bravest and strongest person I have known," her mother, Celia Amster Bader, adding that she prayed that she might "be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons"...Ginsburg is one of a number of Jewish women who helped to change the rules of professional life and parenthood, making it more possible for mothers, as well as fathers, to become mentors to their offspring, and for daughters, as well as sons, to be fully cherished. A secular but identified Jew and feminist, she offers young Jewish women a powerful example of a committed, achieving, courageous modern professional woman connected to her ethnic roots as well as to the broad interests of American women as a class. When Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court, she learned from a former classmate that her law school nickname had been "Bitch." Ginsburg's response was typical of the line of assertive Jewish women from which she had sprung: "Better bitch than mouse," she replied."

"I first met Justice Ginsburg a year ago, when she invited me to her chambers and to a tea for international fellows from Georgetown law school, at which she was speaking. It struck me then, as we walked through the courthouse, that each marker she pointed out involved women’s history — from a photograph and a political cartoon in the hallway outside her chambers of Belva Lockwood, the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar, to the renaming of a dining room at the court in honor of Natalie Cornell Rehnquist, wife of the late chief justice. (The tribute was O’Connor’s idea. “My former chief was a traditionalist, but he could hardly object,” Ginsburg said with a bit of glee.)"

"It was lucky that I met Marty at a time when the best degree that a girl could have not her BA or her JD, it was her M-R-S."

"When I’m sometimes asked ‘When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?’ and my answer is: ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that."

"To restate the key question in this case, the issue centrally debated by the parties: Absent congressional authorization, does the Elections Clause preclude the people of Arizona from creating a commission operating independently of the state legislature to establish congressional districts? The history and purpose of the Clause weigh heavily against such preclusion, as does the animating principle of our Constitution that the people themselves are the originating source of all the powers of government."

"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."

"Generally change in our society is incremental. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time."

"If you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it. I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me."

"The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama,” she wrote. “‘The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion."

"People ask me sometimes... 'When will there be enough women on the court?' And my answer is, 'When there are nine.' People are shocked, but there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

"Justice O'Connor had set the model. She had breast surgery and she was on the bench nine days after her surgery. She said, 'Now, Ruth, have your chemotherapy on a Friday. That way, you have the weekend to get over it'"

""The women going to this law school, you will have many opportunities. What about the girl who is undereducated, drops out of school when she's a teenager and pregnant? Helping raise the level of all women is something I think women should care about."

"You're saying, no, State did two kinds of marriage, the full marriage, and then this sort of skim milk marriage."

"Undocumented aliens unfortunately are not protected by the law and they are tremendously subjected to exploitation. The result is that they would be willing to work for a wage that no person who is welcome in our shores would, would take. I think the answer to that problem is in Congress' lap. People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say "we want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.""

"JUSTICE GINSBURG: The Legislature can make the change, can facilitate the change, as laws like the Family Medical Leave Act do. But it’s not something a court can decree. A court can’t tell the man, You’ve got to do more than carry out the garbage."

"Q: You have written, “To turn in a new direction, the court first had to gain an understanding that legislation apparently designed to benefit or protect women could have the opposite effect.” The pedestal versus the cage. Has the court made that turn completely, or is there still more work to be done?"

"Nine, nine... There have been nine men there for a long, long time, right? So why not nine women?"

"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."

"It's a facet of the gay rights movement that people don't think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn't until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana's "head and master rule," that the husband was head and master of the house."

"They have never been a 13-year-old girl."

"JUSTICE GINSBURG: I think back to the days when — I don’t know who it was — when I think Truman suggested the possibility of a woman as a justice. Someone said we have these conferences and men are talking to men and sometimes we loosen our ties, sometimes even take off our shoes. The notion was that they would be inhibited from doing that if women were around. I don’t know how many times I’ve kicked off my shoes. Including the time some reporter said something like, it took me a long time to get up from the bench. They worried, was I frail? To be truthful I had kicked off my shoes, and I couldn’t find my right shoe; it traveled way underneath."

"JUSTICE GINSBURG:: If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, You don’t know how to use the English language, or how could you make that argument? It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive."