Home > Work > Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
61 " 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. "
― Irin Carmon , Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
62 " 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. "
63 " 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. "
64 " Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark. "
65 " There’s full marriage and then there’s sort of skim milk marriage. "
66 " 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. "
67 " The people closest to RBG find her entrance to the zeitgeist hilarious, if perplexing. “It’s hard for me to think of someone less likely to care about being a cult figure,” says David Schizer, a former RBG clerk and now a friend. "
68 " 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.” In "
69 " 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. "
70 " What Wiesenfeld meant by “alternative,” and what was hinted by RBG’s use of the phrase life partner was a marriage in which the woman didn’t lose herself and her autonomy, in which two humans shared their lives and goals on equal footing. "
71 " 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. "
72 " Do I want this or not? And if I do, I’ll do it. "
73 " None of these problems were new. What was new was that anyone thought it was worth it to complain about it. "
74 " When Scalia dissents, he pours gasoline on the majority, lights a match, and stomps on the ashes. "
75 " 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. "
76 " 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 "
77 " One is to seek ever more the joys of being alive, because who knows how much longer I will be living? At my age, one must take things day by day. "
78 " 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. Those "
79 " sacrifice; it’s family. "
80 " Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark. Early in her career, RBG wanted to work at a law firm, maybe teach a little. The world as it was had no room for her. That injustice left her no choice but to achieve bombshells. It was easy to miss, maybe because it didn’t look like male bomb throwing. "