Top 100 Sonia Sotomayor Quotes
#1. Since I have difficulty defining merit and what merit alone means - and in any context, whether it's judicial or otherwise - I accept that different experiences in and of itself, bring merit to the system.
Sonia Sotomayor
#2. Sonia lives her life fully. If she dies tomorrow, she'll die happy. If she lives the way you want her to live, she'll die miserable. So leave her alone, okay?
Sonia Sotomayor
#3. You cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. The real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.
Sonia Sotomayor
#4. I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.
Sonia Sotomayor
#5. I am willing to bet that there are some Puerto Ricans who don't know about [their status].
Sonia Sotomayor
#6. The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way.
Sonia Sotomayor
#7. In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.
Sonia Sotomayor
#8. Being a justice. If you love law the way I do ... you're given the job of a lifetime ... you're permitted to address the most important legal questions of the country, and sometimes the world. And in doing so, you make a difference in people's lives.
Sonia Sotomayor
#9. [On the desert:] The wind was a constant, and when you paid attention, it seemed like the earth's own breathing.
Sonia Sotomayor
#10. I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.
Sonia Sotomayor
#11. Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.
Sonia Sotomayor
#12. The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders.
Sonia Sotomayor
#13. I savor life. When you have anything that threatens life ... it prods you into stepping back and really appreciating the value of life and taking from it what you can.
Sonia Sotomayor
#14. I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me, they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
Sonia Sotomayor
#15. When you have strong views about how to approach thinking about the law, then that view is going to lead to certain results in certain situations. And so people seem to think this predictability is based on some kind of partisan political view. But it's not.
Sonia Sotomayor
#16. I have never, ever focused on the negative of things. I always look at the positive.
Sonia Sotomayor
#17. Reaching a conclusion has to start with what the parties are arguing, but examining in all situations carefully the facts as they prove them or not prove them, the record as they create it, and then making a decision that is limited to what the law says on the facts before the judge.
Sonia Sotomayor
#18. Her rocking chair of carved wood and woven cane tilted between this world and another that was beyond imagining, wafting scents of talcum and medicinal tea, auras of lace-edged santos whose eyes rolled up to a heaven too close for comfort.
Sonia Sotomayor
#19. When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.
Sonia Sotomayor
#20. When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
Sonia Sotomayor
#21. [T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.
Sonia Sotomayor
#22. It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law.
Sonia Sotomayor
#23. I've never had my dexterity called into question, but I think if that was ever the case, I could acquit myself by tossing a ball back and forth horizontally between my hands.
Sonia Sotomayor
#24. I do know one thing about me: I don't measure myself by others' expectations or let others define my worth.
Sonia Sotomayor
#25. I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.
Sonia Sotomayor
#26. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.
Sonia Sotomayor
#27. I felt like everyones second choice, which is why a compliment could catch me off guard. Page 106
Sonia Sotomayor
#28. An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.
Sonia Sotomayor
#29. I've spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me.
Sonia Sotomayor
#30. I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.
Sonia Sotomayor
#31. The bride Celina and her groom Omar, with Junior, now Dr. Sotomayor. As my first official act,
Sonia Sotomayor
#32. As for the possibility of 'having it all,' career and family with no sacrifice to either, that is a myth we would do well to abandon, together with the pernicious notion that a woman who chooses one of the other is somehow deficient.
Sonia Sotomayor
#33. I would warn any minority student today against the temptations of self-segregation: take support and comfort from your own group as you can, but don't hide within it.
Sonia Sotomayor
#34. He was teaching the common-law rule against perpetuities, which limits how far into the future a will can control a line of inheritance.
Sonia Sotomayor
#35. There's a great variety of people in Washington, but I think because of the great concentration of people in New York, that variety is more visible. You walk the streets and there are people of every color, shape and size, ethnic background, religion, it doesn't matter. It's always present.
Sonia Sotomayor
#36. If the issue is letting the states experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction, why is taking a case now the answer?
Sonia Sotomayor
#37. All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.
Sonia Sotomayor
#38. I accept the proposition that ... to judge is an exercise of power and because ... there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives
no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging, I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.
Sonia Sotomayor
#39. Oh my God, I don't think you can say anyone looks forward to controversy.
Sonia Sotomayor
#40. It is very important when you judge to recognize that you have to stay impartial. That's what the nature of my job is. I have to unhook myself from my emotional responses and try to stay within my unemotional, objective persona.
Sonia Sotomayor
#41. What's quote-unquote a 'good' lawyer, doctor, or whatever the profession is. And if you're a male who grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.
Sonia Sotomayor
#42. I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.
Sonia Sotomayor
#43. So many people grew up with challenges, as I did. There weren't always happy things happening to me or around me. But when you look at the core of goodness within yourself - at the optimism and hope - you realize it comes from the environment you grew up in.
Sonia Sotomayor
#44. I am growing to love DC.This [Washington] is a beautiful city. I think every citizen should come see their capital. A lot of the museums are free, there are restaurants that are reasonably priced.
Sonia Sotomayor
#45. In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense.
Sonia Sotomayor
#46. I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
Sonia Sotomayor
#47. [T]he more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.
Sonia Sotomayor
#48. Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in heaven. To succeed in this world, you have to be known to people.
Sonia Sotomayor
#49. If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it. I have faith in the process of the law, and if it is carried out fairly, I can live with the results, whatever they may be.
Sonia Sotomayor
#50. If your child marches to a different beat, a different drummer, you might just have to go along with that music. Help them achieve what's important to them.
Sonia Sotomayor
#51. A career is something that you train for and prepare for and plan on doing for a long time.
Sonia Sotomayor
#52. We educated, privileged lawyers have a professional and moral duty to represent the underrepresented in our society, to ensure that justice exists for all, both legal and economic justice.
Sonia Sotomayor
#53. I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.
Sonia Sotomayor
#54. People who live in difficult circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible. Page 1.
Sonia Sotomayor
#55. When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.
Sonia Sotomayor
#56. I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.
Sonia Sotomayor
#57. Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.
Sonia Sotomayor
#58. In every position that I've been in, there have been naysayers who don't believe I'm qualified or who don't believe I can do the work. And I feel a special responsibility to prove them wrong.
Sonia Sotomayor
#59. I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188
Sonia Sotomayor
#60. There are things you may know in your heart for a long while without admitting them to conscious awareness, until, unexpectedly, something triggers an inescapable realization.
Sonia Sotomayor
#61. Good people can do bad things, make bad decisions. It doesn't make them bad people.
Sonia Sotomayor
#62. No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.
Sonia Sotomayor
#63. I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.
Sonia Sotomayor
#64. Every people has a past, but the dignity of a history comes when a community of scholars devotes itself to chronicling and studying that past.
Sonia Sotomayor
#65. It is our responsibility to explain to the public how an often unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized, but always evolving, society.
Sonia Sotomayor
#67. I was raised in a Bronx public housing project, but studied at two of the nation's finest universities. I did work as an assistant district attorney, prosecuting violent crimes that devastate our communities.
Sonia Sotomayor
#68. A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence. Page 115
Sonia Sotomayor
#69. The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.
Sonia Sotomayor
#70. To have a romance, you have to have time. I'm a justice. I've written a book. The guy's gonna have to wait until I'm a little bit freer.
Sonia Sotomayor
#71. I couldn't even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita's sadness.
Sonia Sotomayor
#72. I listened very, very carefully to the world around me to pick up the signals of when trouble was coming. Not that I could stop it. But it made me observant. That was helpful when I became a lawyer, because I knew how to read people's signals.
Sonia Sotomayor
#73. I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income, because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all. I have no right to complain.
Sonia Sotomayor
#74. The first case I sat on ... was Citizens United. Talk about being thrown in. Needless to say, if I was scared before, I was terrified.
Sonia Sotomayor
#75. I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.
Sonia Sotomayor
#76. I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background or life experiences.
Sonia Sotomayor
#77. I think being a Catholic made me a better person. It taught me how to choose good over evil, and how to be a more caring human being.
Sonia Sotomayor
#78. To me, lawyering is the height of service - and being involved in this profession is a gift.
Sonia Sotomayor
#79. I got a label because I was Hispanic and a woman and [therefore] I had to be liberal.
Sonia Sotomayor
#80. The challenges I have faced - among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother - are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.
Sonia Sotomayor
#81. Sometimes it gets boring. No justice is supposed to say that. But, you know, there's drudgery in every job you're going to do.
Sonia Sotomayor
#82. When you come from a background like mine, where you're entering worlds that are so different than your own, you have to be afraid.
Sonia Sotomayor
#83. The Latino community anchored me, but I didn't want it to isolate me from the full extent of what Princeton had to offer, including engagement with the larger community. Page 148
Sonia Sotomayor
#84. I don't prejudge issues. I come to every case with an open mind. Every case is new to me.
Sonia Sotomayor
#85. How many times would a defendant's lawyer enter the courtroom before a session and ask each of the male clerks and paralegals around me, 'Are you the assistant in charge?' while I sat there invisible to him at the head of the table?
Sonia Sotomayor
#86. As difficult an environment as the DA's Office could be, I saw no overarching conspiracy against women. The unequal treatment was usually more a matter of old habits dying hard.
Sonia Sotomayor
#87. My diabetes is such a central part of my life ... it did teach me discipline ... it also taught me about moderation ... I've trained myself to be super-vigilant ... because I feel better when I am in control.
Sonia Sotomayor
#88. I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.
Sonia Sotomayor
#89. You can't dream unless you know what the possibilities are.
Sonia Sotomayor
#90. Remember that no one succeeds alone. Never walk alone in your future paths.
Sonia Sotomayor
#91. I think it's important to move people beyond just dreaming into doing. They have to be able to see that you are just like them, and you made it.
Sonia Sotomayor
#92. If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.
Sonia Sotomayor
#93. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.
Sonia Sotomayor
#95. I accepted what the Sisters taught in religion class: that God is loving, merciful, charitable, forgiving. That message didn't jibe with adults smacking kids.
Sonia Sotomayor
#96. Sometimes, even if there was no useful advice to give, I saw that listening still helped.
Sonia Sotomayor
#97. Achievement was all very well, but it was the process, not
Sonia Sotomayor
#98. I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.
Sonia Sotomayor
#100. I think there's a large segment of the mainland population that does not really understand the number of territories that are part of the United States.
Sonia Sotomayor
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