A biography for Ruth Bader Ginsburghasn’t been written yet.
“In the '50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.”
“Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.”
“An operatic voice is like no other.”
“If I had any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.”
“A gender line... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”
“In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It's called 'Scalia/Ginsburg.' The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.”
“I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the '80s and '90s.”
“She never envisioned a legal career for me, but she did think it was very important that I be able to support myself, and I think she would be pleased to see what has become of me.”
“People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.”
“I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women's organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man's world.”
“My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.”
“So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.”
“'Whole Women's Health' made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.”
“It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,' but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.”
“I thought 'Heller' was a very bad decision.”
“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 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.”
“My mother graduated from high school at 15 and went to work to support the family because the eldest son went to college.”
“I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.”
“At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.”