Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes

American lawyer and jurist (1933–2020)

Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She was the second female justice (after Sandra Day O'Connor) and was one of three female justices serving on the Supreme Court (along with Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan). She was generally viewed as belonging to the liberal wing of the Court. Before becoming a judge, Ginsburg spent a considerable portion of her legal career as an advocate for the advancement of women's rights as a constitutional principle. She advocated as a volunteer lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and was a member of its board of directors and one of its general counsel in the 1970s. She was a professor at Rutgers School of Law–Newark and Columbia Law School. Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Notorious R.B.G. • R.B.G.

Birth Name: Joan Ruth Bader

Alternative Names: Joan Ruth Biggie • Ruth Joan Biggie Ginsburg • Joan Ruth Biggie Ginsburg • Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg • Notorious RBG • RBG • Ruth Bader • notorious rbg

From Wikidata (CC0)

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

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

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'

am comforted, at such times, by a comment made by Chief Justice Hughes, who presided from 1930 until 1941. Hughes said that during the many years he served on the Court he always tried to write his opinions logically and clearly, but if another Justice whose vote was necessary to make a majority insisted that particular language be put in, in it went, and let the law schools figure out what it meant!

As you leave here and proceed along life's paths, try to leave tracks. Use the education you have received to help repair tears in your communities. Take part in efforts to move those communities, your nation, and our world closer to the conditions needed to ensure the health and well-being of your generation and generations following your own.

exuberant presence of Justice Scalia, the Court is “a paler place.” The two cases at the top of Justice Ginsburg’s most

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

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

also expanded to include women as well as racial and ethnic minorities. I was the beneficiary of the Nixon administration’s affirmative action effort when, in 1972, I was engaged by the Columbia University law faculty as the first woman ever to hold a tenured position there.

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.

[I want to be remembered as] someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.

Ruth very much admired her mother, who encouraged Ruth to be independent and self-sufficient.

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.

We should not be held back from pursuing our full talents, from contributing what we could contribute to the society, because we fit into a certain mould — because we belong to a group that historically has been the object of discrimination.

Thomas Jefferson put it this way: Were our state a pure democracy there would still be excluded from our deliberations women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issues, should not mix promiscuously in gatherings of men.2