Many people may not know who Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, especially if you don’t live or are from the US, but she has a massive contribution in fighting for some of the most fundamental rights people should have. Born as Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, also known as RBG, at Beth Moses Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, she became the second female justice of the supreme court and served as a director of the Women’s rights project in 1970.
She was an American lawyer and a jurist of the Supreme Court until her death. Some of her achievements include authoring the United States v. Virginia landmark case, influencing her colleagues on the case Safford Unified School District v Redding, and Olmstead v. LC, in which the court ruled that mental illness is a form of disability, among others.
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RUTH BADER GINSBURG QUOTES COMPILATION
Her most famous books include My Own Words, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, Text, Cases, Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination, and more. To further commemorate Ginsburg’s Legacy, we compiled a list of Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes that can serve as a reminder and guide or an eye-opener of some sort. Take a look at these products with Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes.
“My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant to be your own person, be INDEPENDENT.”
“The greatest statement of equality is in the Declaration of Independence, written by a slaveholder.”
“If you’re a boy and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s okay. We should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers.”
“I don’t say women’s rights—I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.”
“I didn’t change the Constitution; the equality principle was there from the start. I just was an advocate for seeing its full realization.”
“Yet what greater defeat could we suffer than to come to resemble the forces we oppose in their disrespect for human dignity?”
“The words of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause – nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.’ Well that word, ‘any person,’ covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971.”
“It’s an unconscious bias. It’s the expectation. You have a lowered expectation when you hear a woman speaking, I think that still goes on. That instinctively when a man speaks, he will be listened to, where people will not expect the woman to say anything of value. But all of the women in my generation have had, time and again, that experience where you say something at a meeting, and nobody makes anything of it. And maybe half an hour later, a man makes the identical point, and people react to it and say, ‘Good idea.’ That, I think, is a problem that persists.”
“In recent years, people have said, ‘This is the way I am.’ And others looked around, and we discovered it’s our next-door neighbor—we’re very fond of them, or it’s our child’s best friend or even our child. I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”
“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. If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her impact can be seen in the American’s daily life as she expanded the possibilities of family life and work both for men and women. Her legal legacy can be traced back to the 70s when she and others won numerous groundbreaking gender-discrimination cases that include a narrow view of gender roles within families.
Some of the cases she advocated include a woman in the Air Force whose husband was denied a spousal allowance which the military wives are entitled to have, and a father who was denied social security survivors benefits after the death of his wife, among others.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg even became a pop culture icon. Shana Knizhnik created an alter ego for her called notorious RBG, which became a hit overnight. A documentary called RBG was released in 2018, and not long after, the movie called On the Basis of Sex, a biopic, was released. Ginsburg died on September 18. 2020 from pancreatic cancer.
I hope that this compilation list of Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes shows that the people who don’t know her would have a slightly in-depth glimpse of her perspective and what she fought for. One of the Stanford professors said that it’s not just one thing that has been different because of her. Come to think of it, everything has been different. Her legacy has been immensely expansive.