46 Quotes by Irin Carmon

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.

RBG’s old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice’s image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem’s own long-standing observation: “Women lose power with age, and men gain it.” Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else.

After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.

RBG has never been very interested in drawing attention to herself without a good reason. That’s how you know that when she does send up smoke signals, something has gone very wrong.

A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.

August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.

Suddenly, she felt the ground steady under her. These men, the most important judges in the country, were her captive audience for the next ten minutes. RBG knew so much more about the case and the topic than they did. She had to teach them. She knew how to do that. RBG had been teaching law for almost a decade.

RBG’s most famous words in the Hobby Lobby dissent could have appeared in any of her searing dissents: “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.

So when RBG was asked how she had managed to have such an extraordinary marriage, she often answered by saying that Marty himself was extraordinary, and he saw the same in her.