Rbg Quotes

The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.

How to be Like RBG: Work for what you believe in, but pick your battles, and don’t burn your bridges. Don’t be afraid to take charge, think about what you want, then do the work, but then enjoy what makes you happy, bring along your crew, have a sense of humor. -Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon

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.

RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf.

Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.

Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.

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

I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don’t think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are. I think that it is great that we are beginning to use the talents of all of the people, in all walks of life, and that we no longer have the closed doors that we once had.” —RBG

RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time.

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity,” she said simply. “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.

So when RBG was asked how she had managed to have such an extraordinary marriage, she often answered by saying that Marty himself was extraordinary, and he saw the same in her.

RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.

She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.

IRIN: And when the time comes, what would you like to be remembered for?       RBG: 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. —MSNBC interview, 2015

A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.

RBG looked the justices in the eye and quoted Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

The study of law was unusual for women of my generation. For most girls growing up in the 1940s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S.” —RBG

If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,” she said, “I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.” The mantra in her chambers is “Get it right and keep it tight.” She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. “If you can say it in plain English, you should,” RBG says. Going through “innumerable drafts,” the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. “I think that law should be a literary profession,” RBG says, “and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.

Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny,” RBG said. “I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.

When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG's black robe, it's bad news for liberals. That's her dissent collar.

I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me. It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.” —Marty Ginsburg, 1993

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 decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.

RBG has never been one to shrink from a challenge. People who think she is hanging on to this world by a thread underestimate her. RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.

RBG’s longtime friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein says, “I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.

One of the first things many clerks hear from RBG is that the most important job requirement is that they treat her two secretaries well. ‘There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,’ RBG recalled. ‘As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.

RBG’s old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice’s image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem’s own long-standing observation: “Women lose power with age, and men gain it.” Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else.

Anyway, hope springs eternal. If I lose today, there’s hope that tomorrow will be better.” —RBG, 2012

As of this writing, no one has come up with a male counterpart to “schoolmarmish.

She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real.

[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.

Actually, there is no biological connection whatsoever between the function of giving birth to and nursing a child and the function of washing its clothes, preparing its food, and trying to bring it up to be a good and harmonious person,” Moberg wrote. “Both men and women have one main role: that of being human beings.

The most painful thing in life is to watch the people you love wither away.

RBG saw injustice in the world and she used her abilities to help change it.

Suddenly, she felt the ground steady under her. These men, the most important judges in the country, were her captive audience for the next ten minutes. RBG knew so much more about the case and the topic than they did. She had to teach them. She knew how to do that. RBG had been teaching law for almost a decade.

My mother-in-law meant simply this,” RBG said. “Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.

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

So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.

Someday, we will go back to having the kind of legislature that we should, where members, whatever party they belong to, want to make the thing work and cooperate with each other to see that that will happen.

August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.

Her time was almost up. RBG looked the justices in the eye and quoted Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

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

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” —Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls

Always be independent.

He’s never been in awe of anybody. He wooed and won her by convincing her how much he respected her.

Present the court with the next logical step,

She is painstaking in presenting facts, on the theory that the truth is weapon enough.

My mother’s advice was, don’t lose time on useless emotions like anger, resentment, remorse, envy. Those, she said, will just sap time; they don’t get you where you want to be.

1963: RBG becomes the second woman to teach full-time at Rutgers School of Law.   “[The dean explained] it was only fair to pay me modestly, because my husband had a very good job.

When she left the library, RBG knew this much: Her days of quiet acceptance were over.

Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.

RBG’s most famous words in the Hobby Lobby dissent could have appeared in any of her searing dissents: “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.

RBG: The Declaration is our first statement of the idea of equality, though that great statement, “all [persons] are created equal,” was penned by a slave owner.

RBG has never been very interested in drawing attention to herself without a good reason. That’s how you know that when she does send up smoke signals, something has gone very wrong.

So, my objective was to take the Court step by step to the realization, in Justice Brennan’s words, that the pedestal on which some thought women were standing all too often turned out to be a cage.

By the way, I said my affirmative action plan would be for men as teachers in kindergarten and grade schools. I think it would be wonderful for children, if they could see men in caring roles just as they see women.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels,” the president said. “Having experienced discrimination,” he added, “she devoted the next twenty years of her career to fighting it and making this country a better place for our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters.” RBG would have added, “And our husbands, our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.

The idea was there from the beginning: equality. And yet you can read every page of your pocket Constitution and you will not find, in the original Constitution, the word equal, or equality, even though equality was a main theme of the Declaration of Independence. The word equal becomes a part of the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment.

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 a note. "This is your first opinion for the Court," she had written. "It is a fine one, I look forward to many more." Remembering the comfort that note gave her on such a nerve wracking day, RBG did the same for the next two women to join the court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

6/17/10 My dearest Ruth—You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!! I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less. Marty -- Handwritten letter from Marty to Ruth

From her days as an advocate to her days as a justice, Ginsburg insisted that men and women would be truly equal only when they took equal responsibility for child rearing. She wrote as early as 1972 that “child rearing, as distinguished from child bearing, does not involve a physical characteristic unique to one sex,

Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy. They’re not productive and don’t get you anyplace, so get over it.

I’m going to tell you the secret of a happy marriage: It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” In her outstretched hand were a pair of earplugs.

After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.

There’s full marriage and then there’s sort of skim milk marriage.

a court ought not be affected by the weather of the day it will be by the climate of the era

As we live, we can learn,

Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.

This is my dream of the way the world should be.’ When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated,

In my long life, I have seen many changes. Changes for the better. The most important is that we are not using the talent of all the people, not just half of them.

The Court is the guardian of the Bill of Rights, and it should see to it that Congress remembers that Congress is to pass no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

Well, emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive. They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control.

judges should generally uphold laws passed by majorities that favor minorities, unless there is strong evidence that the political process is not working.

Changes for the better. The most important is that we are now using the talent of all of the people, not just half of them.

I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don't think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are.

When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will be truly liberated.

She viewed her advocacy not as a crusade for abstract principles but as a fight for justice for individual men and women disadvantaged by laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.

If we imagine the worst-case scenario, with Roe v. Wade overruled, there would remain many states that would not go back to the way it once was. It doesn’t matter what Congress or the state legislatures do, there will be other states that provide this facility, and women will have access to it if they can pay for it. Women who can’t pay are the only women who would be affected.

For decades, some feminists had said the solution was an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, which would read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” This amendment, known as the ERA, had been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923, but each time it had been held up in committee.

Read closely, it very gently suggested the majority was being a bunch of arrogant hypocrites, who had checked their commitment to states’ rights at the door when it served the Republican party.

Just think how you would like the women in your family to be treated, particularly your daughters. And when you see men behaving in ways they should not, you should tell them this is improper behavior.

My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.

Well, emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive. They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control. In the days when I was a flaming feminist litigator, I never said to judges who asked improper questions, “You sexist pig.

If only the court had acted more slowly,’ RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had ‘halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue. (85).

For Ginsburg, therefore, the #MeToo movement, in which women used social media and other platforms to demand the same respect in the workplace as their male colleagues, was a vindication of her vision that women should empower themselves by joining the workplace in numbers and refusing to tolerate unequal treatment, intentional or unintentional. Ginsburg believes that the Constitution should be interpreted to root out unconscious biases that subordinate women. But as she recognized decades ago, true equality requires that men and women work together to root out unconscious bias in families and in the workplace.

Ginsburg maintained that restrictions on abortion are best understood not as a private matter between women and their male doctors; instead, the restrictions violate women’s constitutional right to equality by limiting their ability to define their own life choices, imposing burdens that are not imposed on men.

Our argument: don’t stereotype people because they are male or because they are female. Recognizing that the stereotype might well be true for the vast majority of people, but there are people who don’t fit the mold, and they should be allowed to make choices, to live their lives without being pigeonholed because of their sex.

By not taking no for an answer. If you have a dream, something you want to pursue, and you’re willing to do the work that’s necessary to make the dream come true, don’t let anyone tell you, you can’t do it. And you have, nowadays, many like-minded people to join you in opposing unfair treatment, treatment of you as less than a full citizen.

To go back to Brown, a concern the United States government had was definitely part of the picture. At that time, we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the State Department filed a brief in Brown v. Board urging the Court to end what was basically apartheid in America. It said, we are being embarrassed constantly by the Soviet Union charging that the United States is a racist society. Please, Court, help us to end that era.

Ginsburg argued that if the Supreme Court in 1973 had simply struck down the Texas law at issue in the case and had resisted the temptation to impose a national framework for abortion, the case might have inspired less of a backlash, allowing a growing number of state legislatures to recognize a right to reproductive choice on their own. What her feminist critics in the 1990s failed to appreciate was that Ginsburg was laying the groundwork for a firmer constitutional foundation for reproductive choice, one rooted in women’s equality rather than the right to privacy.

It turned out there was something Marty did a little better. It all started with tuna casserole, or at least something RBG called tuna casserole. At Fort Sill one night, right after they were married, she dutifully presented the dish. That was her job, after all, or one of them. Marty squinted at the lumpy mass. “What is it?” And then he taught himself how to cook. The Escoffier cookbook had been a wedding gift from RBG’s cousin Richard. The legendary French chef had made his name at hotels like the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. It was not exactly everyday fare for two young working parents on a military base in Oklahoma. But Marty found that his chemistry skills came in handy, and he began working his way through the book. Photograph by Mariana Cook made at the Ginsburgs’ home in 1998 Still, for years, the daily cooking was still RBG’s reluctant territory. Her repertoire involved thawing a frozen vegetable and some meat. “I had seven things I could make,” RBG said, “and when we got to number seven, we went back to number one.” Jane isn’t sure she saw a fresh vegetable until she was sent to France the summer she turned fourteen. Around that time, she decided, as RBG put it to me, “that Mommy should be phased out of the kitchen altogether.” RBG cooked her last meal in 1980. The division of labor in the family, Jane would say, developed into this: “Mommy does the thinking and Daddy does the cooking.” Growing up, James says, he got used to people asking him what his father did for a living, when his mother did something pretty interesting too.

If involuntary discharge of a woman solely on the ground of her pregnancy is not sex discrimination, nothing is!

Only a woman’s body showed proof of having sex, and only women were punished for having it.

Killing the Voting Rights Act because it had worked too well, she had added, was like 'throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

Royal Canadian Air Force exercise plan,

None of these problems were new. What was new was that anyone thought it was worth it to complain about it.

asked by Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times about the fact that in that same term, the number of female clerks fell to single digits for the first time in more than a decade. Only seven women would be among the thirty-seven clerks, and two of them were working for RBG. Why not ask a justice who had hired no women? suggested RBG. That would be Alito, Souter, Scalia, and Thomas.

RBG firmly believed that for women to be equal, men had to be free.

Sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.” The analogy had special meaning in the constitutional context: In a series of cases triggered by Brown v. Board of Education, the court had said that laws that classified on the basis of race were almost always unconstitutional, or deserving “strict scrutiny.” The court had said in Reed that it wasn’t applying strict scrutiny, but then it seemed to do so anyway. Were laws that classified what men and women could do blatantly unconstitutional the way laws classifying by race were? RBG boldly urged the court to say they were.

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. . . .