Quotes from Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Dissents speak to a future age.

Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

My biographers... would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided... to flip the order.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

I don't see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

Women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.

The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

Every constitution written since the end of World War II includes a provision that men and women are citizens of equal stature. Ours does not.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation.

Adult women are able to make decisions about their own lives' course no less than men are.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don't have executions.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

I will do this job as long as I feel that I can do it full steam.

The court generally moves in small steps rather than in one giant step.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification.

My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.

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

You can't have it all, all at once... Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough.

Justices continue to think and can change. I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.

Don't be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time.