(W)e do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.
SANDRA DAY O'CONNORIf parents instill a sense of civic-mindedness – and there is no better way to do that than by example – their children will probably follow.
More Sandra Day O'Connor Quotes
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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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Each justice hires their own clerks, and applications are made individually to the justices. It isn’t a group decision.
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I tried to decide each case based on the law and the Constitution.
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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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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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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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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 loved my husband very much, and it was heartbreaking to have him develop Alzheimer’s disease, and to stand by and watch him decline in his ability to take care of himself.
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Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.
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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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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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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 think most people didn’t want to do court duty.
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The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy.
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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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