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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

As we live, we can learn,

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

For a while, her favorites were books about Greek and Norse mythology, and then she graduated to Nancy Drew. “This was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend,” RBG remembered happily.

Dear,” said Evelyn, whom Kiki would soon call Mother, “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.

least he had taken that half step. RBG wrote of the case, “Wiesenfeld is part of an evolution toward a policy of neutrality—a policy that will accommodate traditional patterns, but at the same time, one that requires removal of artificial constraints so that men and women willing to explore their full potential as humans may create new traditions by their actions.

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.

But lately, RBG was tired of pretending not to hear.

There were similarities too. Brooklyn. Like the swaggering lyricist, this tiny Jewish grandmother who demanded patience as she spoke could also pack a verbal punch.

Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else.

People have found her somber, but it is sometimes because her humor is so deadpan dry that it escapes many.

Damn, maybe I didn’t pluck her from obscurity. Maybe she plucked herself from obscurity.” He was right.

It turned out that even though RBG was asking the court to venture somewhere it had never gone, Murray had taken the first steps.

I don’t see myself in the role of a great dissenter and I would much rather carry another mind even if it entails certain compromises,” RBG said at a roundtable on judging in 1985. “Of course there is a question of bedrock principle where I won’t compromise,” she added, but she had “learned a lot about other minds paying attention to people’s personalities in this job.

She would have to be patient. She would have to be strategic. And maybe a little deaf.

Mommy does the thinking and Daddy does the cooking.

Having read that the first year of a child’s life is when the personality is formed, Marty threw himself into caring for Jane while they were living in Oklahoma.

Your son stole the elevator!” “How far could he take it?” Marty replied.

Even their disagreements pleased RBG, in a way: They proved women had diverse views.

Scalia would bring the spoils of a recent hunting trip. “Scalia kills it and Marty cooks it,” said guest and former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olson in 2007. “I never heard them talk about anything political or ideological, because there would be no point,

When Scalia dissents, he pours gasoline on the majority, lights a match, and stomps on the ashes.

But RBG had a job to do, and she wasn’t done yet.

Legacy is a topic RBG won’t linger on, because it has a note of finality. But she will take stock. “In my life, what I find most satisfying is that I was a part of a movement that made life better, not just for women,” RBG says. “I think gender discrimination is bad for everyone, it’s bad for men, it’s bad for children.

To be like RBG in dissent, save your public anger for when there’s lots at stake and when you’ve tried everything else.

RBG gets out—a lot.

Not long before pop culture discovered RBG, liberal law professors and commentators began telling her the best thing she could do for what she cared about was to quit, so that President Barack Obama could appoint a successor. RBG, ardently devoted to her job, has mostly brushed that dirt off her shoulder. Her refusal to meekly shuffle off the stage has been another public, high-stakes act of defiance.

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.

It is as though a special, zestful spice seasons my work and days,” RBG said after her first recovery. “Each thing I do comes with a heightened appreciation that I am able to do it.” That

The world as it was had no room for her.