Top 100 Sotomayor's Quotes
#1. I understand that during [Sonia Sotomayor's] career, she's written hundreds and hundreds of opinions. I haven't read a single one of them, and if I'm fortunate before we end this, I won't have to read one of them.
Harry Reid
#2. Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.
Camille Paglia
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. [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
#6. We have to look and ensure that we're paying attention to what we're doing, so that we don't reflexively institute processes and procedures that exclude people without thought.
Sonia Sotomayor
#7. My job as a prosecutor is to do justice. And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.
Sonia Sotomayor
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the law. The job of a judge is to apply the law.
Sonia Sotomayor
#11. The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.
Sonia Sotomayor
#12. 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
#13. I visit the island [Puerto Rico] as often as I humanly can. And I visit with community as frequently as possible, given the demands on me. I meet with kids. I meet with adults. I try to spend time and to listen to people talk about their lives.
Sonia Sotomayor
#14. I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.
Sonia Sotomayor
#16. 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
#17. Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career.
Sonia Sotomayor
#18. I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.
Sonia Sotomayor
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Oh my God, I don't think you can say anyone looks forward to controversy.
Sonia Sotomayor
#22. 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
#23. All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.
Sonia Sotomayor
#24. 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
#25. I firmly believe in the rule of law as the foundation for all of our basic rights.
Sonia Sotomayor
#26. It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.
Sonia Sotomayor
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.
Sonia Sotomayor
#33. Few aspects of my work in the DA's Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was.
Sonia Sotomayor
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. For weeks, [Sonia] Sotomayor had seen drafts of Ginsburg's opinion as it circulated among the justices. She knew she was about to be a public target. But she would have the courage of her convictions - perhaps stubbornly, misguidedly - yet with confidence enough to be the one in an 8-1 vote.
Joan Biskupic
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.
Sonia Sotomayor
#41. I couldn't even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita's sadness.
Sonia Sotomayor
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. You've got to get your education! It's the only way to get ahead in the world.
Sonia Sotomayor
#45. There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy, and how far we want to protect it and from whom.
Sonia Sotomayor
#46. Kevin defended him. The parish in Yonkers was 100 percent Irish, he rationalized, and the priest had no choice but to affirm his community's values. I disagreed. Bigotry is not a value.
Sonia Sotomayor
#47. 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
#48. I found in my experiences that it's not that men are consciously discriminating against promoting women, but I do believe as people we have self-images about what's good.
Sonia Sotomayor
#50. 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
#51. Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.
Sonia Sotomayor
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Although wisdom is built on life experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.
Sonia Sotomayor
#56. Dressing badly has been a refuge much of my life, a way of compelling others to engage with my mind, not my physical presence. Page. 283
Sonia Sotomayor
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. In my first week as a U.S. senator, I had the privilege of participating in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Al Franken
#62. Sonia Sotomayor is uniquely and exquisitely sensitive to race issues because she is a Latina.
Dahlia Lithwick
#63. [On the desert:] The wind was a constant, and when you paid attention, it seemed like the earth's own breathing.
Sonia Sotomayor
#64. 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
#65. I have never, ever focused on the negative of things. I always look at the positive.
Sonia Sotomayor
#66. 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
#67. I am willing to bet that there are some Puerto Ricans who don't know about [their status].
Sonia Sotomayor
#68. It's fine to be on the side of the little guy, but he too will ultimately suffer if the health and concerns of the greater body he belongs to are neglected.
Sonia Sotomayor
#69. The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.
Sonia Sotomayor
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.
Sonia Sotomayor
#73. To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story.
Noah Feldman
#74. As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.
Sonia Sotomayor
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.
Sonia Sotomayor
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The bride Celina and her groom Omar, with Junior, now Dr. Sotomayor. As my first official act,
Sonia Sotomayor
#81. 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
#82. All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.
Sonia Sotomayor
#83. I've spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me.
Sonia Sotomayor
#85. I do think there is a value in the services of judges for long periods of time.
Sonia Sotomayor
#86. 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
#87. I felt like everyones second choice, which is why a compliment could catch me off guard. Page 106
Sonia Sotomayor
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. I do know one thing about me: I don't measure myself by others' expectations or let others define my worth.
Sonia Sotomayor
#91. 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
#92. You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.
Sonia Sotomayor
#93. It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law.
Sonia Sotomayor
#94. [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
#95. I'm a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them.
Sonia Sotomayor
#96. It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted.
Sonia Sotomayor
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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