Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny.
My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.
All I can say is I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.
If you're going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.
I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the '80s and '90s.
At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.
In the course of a marriage, one accommodates the other.
I was tremendously fortunate to be alive and a lawyer, working at a university so I had more flexible hours, when the women's movement was coming alive and when it became possible to argue successfully for a view of the equal protection clause that included women.
Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like.
Remember that before 'Roe v. Wade' was decided, there were four states that allowed abortion in the first trimester if that's what the woman sought: New York, Hawaii, California, Alaska. Other states were shifting. And people were fighting over this issue in state legislatures.
We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.
We had to go on and do the work of the court and we did.
Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment as a lawyer when I earned my degree.
If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be 'Citizens United.' I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.
It's hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.
We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, 'We, the people.'
My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.
The court generally moves in small steps rather than in one giant step.
The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.
My resume showed membership on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews, a credit impressive abroad where it was not generally known that Law Reviews were student-operated publications.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.
Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court.
After the pancreatic cancer, at first I went to N.I.H. every three months, then every four months, then every six months.
Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.
Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.
I do a variety of weight-lifting, elliptical glider, stretching exercises, push-ups.
How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.
In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It's called 'Scalia/Ginsburg.' The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.
Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.
In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.
I can't imagine what this place would be - I can't imagine what the country would be - with Donald Trump as our president.
I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.
'Whole Women's Health' made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.
We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.
If I had any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.
My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn't have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.
When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn't realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.
A gender line... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.
My mother graduated from high school at 15 and went to work to support the family because the eldest son went to college.
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.'
Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don't have executions.
It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation.
The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.
I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.
Justice Scalia and I served together on the D.C. Circuit. So his votes are not surprising to me. What I like about him is that he's very funny and very smart.
If you just needed the skills to pass the bar, two years would be enough. But if you think of law as a learned profession, then a third year is an opportunity for, on the one hand, public service and practice experience, but on the other, also to take courses that round out the law that you didn't have time to do.
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.
The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.
Dissents speak to a future age.
