Lisa Jablonsky

“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, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“One of the first things many clerks hear from RBG is that the most important job requirement is that they treat her two secretaries well. ‘There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,’ RBG recalled. ‘As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg