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Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg QUOTES

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

2 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

4 " The adoring portrayal of an older woman like RBG as both fierce and knowing, points out the feminist author Rebecca Traister, is “a crucial expansion of the American imagination with regard to powerful women.” For too long, Traister says, older women have been reduced in our cultural consciousness to “nanas, bubbes” or “ballbusters, nutcrackers, and bitches. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

5 " She wrote that she was pretty sure more women and people of color could enroll “without denying to white men of merit a fair chance to compete for places. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

6 " RBG would “widely be seen as the most independent, thoughtful, modest judge on the bench. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

7 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

8 " 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). "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

10 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

11 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

14 " 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 "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

15 " 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 Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

16 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

18 " 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 "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

20 " 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. "

― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg