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“’If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,’ she said, ‘I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.’ The mantra in her chambers is ‘Get it right and keep it tight.’ She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. ‘If you can say it in plain English, you should,’ RBG says. Going through ‘innumerable drafts,’ the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. ‘I think that law should be a literary profession,’ RBG says, ‘and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.’”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: ‘We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.’ Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, ‘we the people’ originally left out a lot of people. ‘It would not include me,’ RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don’t think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are. I think that it is great that we are beginning to use the talents of all of the people, in all walks of life, and that we no longer have the closed doors that we once had.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“‘The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity,’ she said simply. ‘It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.’”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Feminism… I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, ‘Free to be You and Me.’ Free to be, if you were a girl—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if you’re a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers—manmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Makers

“Marty [her husband] was an extraordinary person. Of all the boys I had dated, he was the only one who really cared that I had a brain. And he was always, well, making me feel that I was better than I thought I was.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, MSNBC

“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Reuters

On how she would like to be remembered: “Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Town & Country Magazine

“If you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it. I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Town & Country Magazine

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, CNN

“My mother was very strong about my doing well in school and living up to my potential. Two things were important to her and she repeated them endlessly. One was to ‘be a lady,’ and that meant conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way. And the other was to be independent, which was an unusual message for mothers of that time to be giving their daughters.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, My Own Words

“To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, CNN

Henry Longfellow Quote on Rain and What The Best Thing To Do When It’s Raining Is…

“For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining, is to let it rain.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Beyond the Quote (259/365)

You can curse the clouds. Yell at the wind. Blame the rain for ruining your day. You can close your blinds and hide under your blankets. You can turn the TV up real loud so you don’t hear the thunder. You can even browse some “sunny 70” exotic destination locations on IG. But, whether you confront the rain with anger and hostility or dig your head into the pit of your couch and pretend like it doesn’t exist, one thing is for sure—it’s going to keep on raining.

The French have an expression: Reculer pour mieux sauter. This means that you have to step back, retreat a little, if you’re going to successfully jump over something. Want to jump across a ditch? You don’t just walk to the edge and then leap. You walk to the edge, gauge the distance, and then retreat a bit to give yourself room to get a full running start before you leap. Sometimes we can’t take the next leap forward unless we take the time to step back first. Where will you get the strength to sauter (leap forward) if you can’t allow yourself to reculer (pull back)?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 87)

Beyond the Quote (258/365)

Keep moving forward is the motto, yes. But, how to move forward if you walked yourself up to a ditch (as is often the case in life)? Moving forward in that case is to fall into the ditch and get stuck (or worse). So, as Kirshenbaum illustrates above, we move backwards so that we can gain the strength and momentum needed to run and jump over the ditch. In other words, sometimes the best way to keep moving forward is to move backwards, first.

“You need to find out what juices your batteries. You need to do more to a battery than simply leave it alone to fill it up with electricity again. You have to fill it with what it needs. To recharge spiritually, you need to put yourself into a new context where you can get new answers. That way you can get plugged in to something that has the power you need.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 91)

“Recreation doesn’t just mean enjoying yourself. It literally means re-creating yourself. It’s almost a way of taking yourself apart and putting yourself back together again so that you feel better and function better. And so that you’ve worked out some of the glitches in your system.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 88)

“Rest doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means lying fallow, and that means restoring the nutrition you’ve lost. It’s about building yourself up. Reculer means retreating so you can advance. And retreating carries with it all the implications of a religious retreat—a way to spend energy to get more energy.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 88)

Eckhart Tolle Quote on Understanding Who You Are and How You Might Best Influence Others

“Who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even than what you do.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 202)

Beyond the Quote (257/365)

But, isn’t what we say and what we do, who we are? Sure, our words and actions are key indicators of our identity, but what Tolle points out as being even more important is the intention behind the words and actions. It’s in how we say what we say and in how we do what we do that makes all of the difference. This is a crucial understanding because therefore, it’s the how that points us to understanding who we are.

“If the whole world was blind, how many people would you impress?”
Unknown

Beyond the Quote (256/365)

As it stands, the world is predominantly vision based. Meaning, most of what we interpret from our worlds—our environments—is absorbed from what we see. Less of what we learn is from hearing and less from that is tasting, smelling, and feeling. And because most of us rely on vision, vision becomes the predominant method for hierarchically organizing our world. In other words, we organize our world into “desirable” and “less desirable” based on what we see more than any other sense, because sight is our primary source of information gathering.