Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

“There are some women I definitely would not want to succeed me... but a man like David Souter, that would be great.”

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

“I was a super once - an extra - in 'Die Fledermaus,' and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.”

“Undocumented aliens unfortunately are not protected by the law, and they are tremendously subjected to exploitation. The result is that they would be willing to work for a wage that no person who is welcome in our shores would take.”

“Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court.”

“I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.”

“Justice Scalia and I served together on the D.C. Circuit. So his votes are not surprising to me. What I like about him is that he's very funny and very smart.”

“I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they're men or women.”

“We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, 'We, the people.'”

“After the pancreatic cancer, at first I went to N.I.H. every three months, then every four months, then every six months.”

“Our goal in the '70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.”

“The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.”

“Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like.”

“If you're going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.”

“Whatever final judgment awaits 'Bush v. Gore' in the annals of history, I am certain that the good work and good faith of the U.S. federal judiciary as a whole will continue to sustain public confidence at a level never beyond repair.”

“It won't happen. It would be an impossible dream. But I'd love to see 'Citizens United' overruled.”

“At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.”

“People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship, and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say, 'We want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.'”

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