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)

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

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Another often-asked question when I speak in public: “Do you have some good advice you might share with us?” Yes, I do. It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. “In every good marriage,” she counseled, “it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through fifty-six years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court of the United States. When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.

the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

lawyer, shaped the legal arguments reflected in the Court’s opinions, earning her the honorific “the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s movement.” By the time she left teaching and litigation for a judgeship on the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, state and federal law had undergone a revolution.

Yet, dare we be at ease? We are part of a world whose unity has been almost completely shattered.

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.

Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.” In our beloved land families were not scattered, communities not erased nor our nation destroyed by the ravages of the World War.

(A sense of humor is helpful for those who would advance social change.)

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!