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.
SANDRA DAY O'CONNORI don’t think it’s the court’s perceived role to do some explaining of a political nature.
More Sandra Day O'Connor Quotes
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(W)e do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.
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It was better for me when I was joined at the court by a second woman. When I was there alone, there was too much media focus on the one woman, and the minute we got another woman, that changed.
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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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I think it’s inevitable that some of the court’s decisions will be found by a segment of the public to be not the right decision or subject to criticism.
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I like to think that the court will continue to be held in high regard by the public. I think it should be.
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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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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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The 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.
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If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.
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I think people know very little, really, about the court, how it works and its history. And both of those things are important in our country, but they’re not things that most citizens know much about.
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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.
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And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer.
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Having family responsibilities and concerns just has to make you a more understanding person.
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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.
SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR