Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes

Best tune out.

Robin Sharma Quote on Time Management and Prioritizing More Of What’s Important

“You must be ruthless with your time. Learn to say no. Having the courage to say no to the little things in life will give you the power to say yes to the big things. Shut the door to your office when you need a few hours to work on that big case. Don’t pick up the phone every time it rings. It is there for your convenience, not the convenience of others. Ironically, people will respect you more when they see that you are a person who values his time. They will realize that your time is precious and they will value it.”
Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Beyond the Quote (285/365)

The first thing you need to figure out is which things are “small” and which things are “big.” If you don’t know the hierarchy of your tasks, how can you prioritize? How can you know what to say “no” to and what to say “yes” to if you don’t know where anything stands as matters of importance? Let’s take a closer look at how you might figure it out.

24 Potent Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes on Equality, Relationships, and Living Up To One’s Potential

Excerpt: 24 potent and insightful Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes that will help you remember and carry on the legacy of “The Notorious RBG.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quote on Intentionally Being A Little Deaf Towards Thoughtless Or Unkind Words

“Another often-asked question when I speak in public: ‘Do you have some good advice you might share with us?‘ Yes, I do. It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. ‘In every good marriage,’ she counseled, ‘it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.’ I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through fifty-six years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court of the United States. When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, My Own Words

Beyond the Quote (260/365)

In every relationship in life, I think it helps to be a little deaf. And I, nor RBG, mean this in a demeaning, belittling, dismissive way for the other person. We mean it in a self-loving kind of way. We choose to be a little deaf towards the thoughtless and unkind types of remarks. The remarks that are not backed by thought, but are rather reactive, emotional, and are lacking of reason or fact. The remarks that do not serve the higher purpose of advancing the argument, but rather attack the person and are derogatory or unkind in nature. Those are the types of thoughts that should fall on deaf ears.

“A generation ago, my students would have been arrested for indecency for wearing the clothes that they do. Sixty-five years ago, it would have been unimaginable that my daughter would aspire to a career. And a hundred years ago, I would not have the right to stand before you. There are a hundred and seventy-eight laws that differentiate on the basis of sex. Count them. The government did the favor of compiling them for you. And while you’re at it, I urge you to read them. They’re obstacles to our children’s aspirations.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones), On The Basis Of Sex

“We’re not asking you to change the country. That’s already happened without any court’s permission. We’re asking you to protect the right of the country to change.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones), On The Basis Of Sex

“There’s full marriage and then there’s sort of skim milk marriage.”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels,‘ the president said. ‘Having experienced discrimination,’ he added, ‘she devoted the next twenty years of her career to fighting it and making this country a better place for our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters.’ RBG would have added, ‘And our husbands, our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.’”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“6/17/10 My dearest Ruth—You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!! I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.” — Handwritten letter from Marty [her husband] to Ruth”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“RBG has never been one to shrink from a challenge. People who think she is hanging on to this world by a thread underestimate her. RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real.”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“One of the first things many clerks hear from RBG is that the most important job requirement is that they treat her two secretaries well. ‘There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,’ RBG recalled. ‘As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.’”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“’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