I always ask my law clerks, in addition to reading all the briefs, including all the amici briefs, that if there's a good law review article, they should bring it to me.

When police or prosecutors conceal significant exculpatory or impeaching material, we hold, it is ordinarily incumbent on the state to set the record straight.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

I think Mozart's operas 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

I thought 'Heller' was a very bad decision.

My mother graduated from high school at 15 and went to work to support the family because the eldest son went to college.

In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.

We had to go on and do the work of the court and we did.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the '80s and '90s.

It won't happen. It would be an impossible dream. But I'd love to see 'Citizens United' overruled.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.

At my advanced age - I'm now an octogenarian - I'm constantly amazed by the number of people who want to take my picture.

The experience I don't want to see repeated occurred in 'Bush v. Gore.' The Court divided five to four. There were four separate dissents, and that confused the press. In fact, some of the reporters announced that the decision was seven-two. There was no time to get together.

My resume showed membership on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews, a credit impressive abroad where it was not generally known that Law Reviews were student-operated publications.

I'm sure I've changed my mind about something. Inevitably, when we grow up - as we get more experience and wiser. Well, I've changed my mind about some food that I didn't like when I was young.

Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.

If you just needed the skills to pass the bar, two years would be enough. But if you think of law as a learned profession, then a third year is an opportunity for, on the one hand, public service and practice experience, but on the other, also to take courses that round out the law that you didn't have time to do.

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

My biographers... would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided... to flip the order.

It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,' but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn't the right one.

The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

You would have a huge statelessness problem if you don't consider a child born abroad a U.S. citizen.

'Whole Women's Health' made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

I think we understand that for the Court to work well, we have to not only respect but genuinely like each other.

Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment as a lawyer when I earned my degree.

The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can't get out the vote in the midterm elections.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn't have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

Ever since my colorectal cancer in 1999, I have been followed by the N.I.H. That was very lucky for me because they detected my pancreatic cancer at a very early stage.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one's ability to persuade.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

You can't have it all, all at once. Who - man or woman - has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

If you're going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.

A gender line... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, 'We, the people.'

So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

I'm a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

There's nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.