Politics & Culture

Honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg with 10 of Her Most 'Notorious' Quotes

Celebrate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her birthday with her best quotes on women's rights and the power of dissent.
authority posing potrait robe smiling standing washington dc furniture indoors room person shelf interior design library bookcase desk table

The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg earned her unofficial title, Notorious RBG, for her bold actions both as a Supreme Court Justice and as a lawyer before that. Prior to her Capitol Hill appointment to the most powerful court bench in the nation, Justice Ginsburg was a trailblazing activist and attorney. She initially attended Harvard Law School, though finished her degree at Columbia University, at a time when few women were accepted into colleges of any kind, let alone Ivy Leagues. She did not arrive at either school with an equal rights agenda. However, the treatment she received for being a woman inspired her to dedicate her career to the empowerment of disenfranchised minorities including, but not limited to women. When she graduated from Columbia Law School in1959 she was tied for first in her class. 

Despite her early academic success, Ginsburg still struggled against discrimination as a female attorney. Following her graduation she was recommended for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter by Albert Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School, but Frankfurter responded that he wasn't ready to hire a woman and asked Sachs to recommend a man. She also had worked for a top New York City law firm the summer of her second year in law school, but was denied employment when she applied after graduate school. She ended up working for Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1959 to 1961. She later worked for Columbia Law School's International Procedure Project and Rutgers Law School in 1963. In 1972 after taking on sex discrimination complaints referred to her by the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, the same year she became the first woman to be granted tenure at Columbia Law School. 

As the second woman ever to earn a Supreme Court seat, Ginsburg had one of the most impactful tenures of all time. A pioneer for social justice issues of gender equality, civil rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, the beloved pioneer passed away this past September 2020 at age 87, due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. In honor of what would have been her 88th birthday, L'OFFICIEL highlights 10 of her most impactful quotes.

1 / 10
"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."
"You can disagree without being disagreeable."
"My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent."
"A gender line...helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage."
"You can’t have it all, all at once. Who—man or woman—has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it."
"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."
"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."
"When I'm sometimes asked 'When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?' and my answer is: 'When there are nine.' People are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."
"It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG. I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me."
"Dissents speak to a future age. 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 and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow."

Tags

Recommended posts for you