Quotes by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“A constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom.”

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

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

“For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: 'When there are nine.”

“The enormous difference between fighting gender discrimination as opposed to race discrimination is good people immediately perceive race discrimination as evil and intolerable. But when I talked a...”

“When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal...”

“When RBG fretted over the first dry opinion the chief justice assigned her, O'Connor gave her a pep talk. As RBG read that opinion on the bench, O'Connor, who had dissented in the case, passed her ...”

“Law should be a literary profession,' RGB says, 'and the best legal practioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.”

“Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

“At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave imped...”

“America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus' famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to t...”

“The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.”

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

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

“I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman's equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling.”

“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 ru...”

“Dissents speak to a future age.”

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

“Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe...”

“My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the '4...”