Irin Carmon Quotes

#1. After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.

Irin Carmon

#2. Someday, we will go back to having the kind of legislature that we should, where members, whatever party they belong to, want to make the thing work and cooperate with each other to see that that will happen.

Irin Carmon

#3. It is as though a special, zestful spice seasons my work and days," RBG said after her first recovery. "Each thing I do comes with a heightened appreciation that I am able to do it." That

Irin Carmon

#4. Always be independent.

Irin Carmon

#5. August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O'Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.

Irin Carmon

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

Irin Carmon

#7. For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: 'When there are nine.

Irin Carmon

#8. RBG has never been very interested in drawing attention to herself without a good reason. That's how you know that when she does send up smoke signals, something has gone very wrong.

Irin Carmon

#9. RBG's most famous words in the Hobby Lobby dissent could have appeared in any of her searing dissents: "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.

Irin Carmon

#10. RBG also understood that how pregnant women were treated had to do with sex. Only a woman's body showed proof of having sex, and only women were punished for having it.

Irin Carmon

#11. What Wiesenfeld meant by "alternative," and what was hinted by RBG's use of the phrase life partner was a marriage in which the woman didn't lose herself and her autonomy, in which two humans shared their lives and goals on equal footing.

Irin Carmon

#12. When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG's black robe, it's bad news for liberals. That's her dissent collar.

Irin Carmon

#13. RBG often repeated her mother's advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law's counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf.

Irin Carmon

#14. There's full marriage and then there's sort of skim milk marriage.

Irin Carmon

#15. The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.

Irin Carmon

#16. Present the court with the next logical step,

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#17. Scalia would bring the spoils of a recent hunting trip. "Scalia kills it and Marty cooks it," said guest and former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olson in 2007. "I never heard them talk about anything political or ideological, because there would be no point,

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#18. Ruth, if you don't want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you," Morris said. "But if you really want to go to law school, you will stop feeling sorry for yourself. You will find a way.

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#19. The world as it was had no room for her.

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#20. There were similarities too. Brooklyn. Like the swaggering lyricist, this tiny Jewish grandmother who demanded patience as she spoke could also pack a verbal punch.

Irin Carmon

#21. But lately, RBG was tired of pretending not to hear.

Irin Carmon

#22. People have found her somber, but it is sometimes because her humor is so deadpan dry that it escapes many.

Irin Carmon

#23. When Scalia dissents, he pours gasoline on the majority, lights a match, and stomps on the ashes.

Irin Carmon

#24. A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.

Irin Carmon

#25. RBG's main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.

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#26. Her former Columbia Law mentee Diane Zimmerman remembers the exuberant party thrown by students and faculty. RBG sat on the floor giggling, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of a bucket.

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#27. Anyway, hope springs eternal. If I lose today, there's hope that tomorrow will be better." - RBG, 2012

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#28. April 18, 2007: RBG launches her era of furious dissent with the abortion case Gonzales v. Carhart.

Irin Carmon

#29. Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself - a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.

Irin Carmon