Saturday, September 26, 2020

Inspiration from RBG - A Tribute

During the days following the recent passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people who knew her personally reflected on their memorable experiences and memories. But for those who watched her from afar, we reflected on her actions and words. I've assembled some of my favorite RBG quotes below.


Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.

I'm a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.

So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.

Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.

Don't be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time.

I pray that I may be all that (my mother) would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons.

I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability.

Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception.

We are at last beginning to relegate to the history books the idea of the token woman.

My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.

And lastly, about RBG:
No other justice in history has become a popular icon in the way RBG did. She modeled for all of us in how to spend a life working to make society and individual lives better. We only can hope for a new justice in her mold. ~Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law


Image Credit: Paying tribute to RBG while attending an exhibit in her honor at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles in February 2019.