I have always thought that while it’s wonderful to be the first to do something, you don’t want to be the last.
SANDRA DAY O'CONNORThe unhappy persistence of both the practice and the lingering effects of racial discrimination …is an unfortunate reality…and the government is not disqualified from acting in response to it.
More Sandra Day O'Connor Quotes
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Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.
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[G]overnment endorsement . . . of religion . . . sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.
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Each justice hires their own clerks, and applications are made individually to the justices. It isn’t a group decision.
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[Court] is an institution that depends on making tough decisions in close cases for reasons that it explains well and that, in the past at least, have proven satisfactory to the public.
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In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.
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If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.
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I tried to decide each case based on the law and the Constitution.
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Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.
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The fact is that knowledge about the Constitution and the Court is not something that is handed down through the gene pool; every generation has to learn it. And I’m not sure the recent generations have done that good a job of learning about it.
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I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed. I do well understand the difference between legislating and judging. As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy.
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I’m a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it’s terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don’t like.
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My sense is that jurists from other nations around the world understand that our court occupies a very special place in the American system, and that the court is rather well regarded in comparison, perhaps, to their own.
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We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
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My hope is that 10 years from now, after I’ve been across the street at work for a while, they’ll all be glad they gave me that wonderful vote.
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Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.
SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR