242 Quotes by Sonia Sotomayor

Don’t mistake politeness for lack of strength.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action – to try to balance out those effects.

When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I’m talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.

Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.

When you have strong views about how to approach thinking about the law, then that view is going to lead to certain results in certain situations. And so people seem to think this predictability is based on some kind of partisan political view. But it’s not.

I’ve never wanted to get adjusted to my income, because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it’s not modest at all. I have no right to complain.

In every position that I’ve been in, there have been naysayers who don’t believe I’m qualified or who don’t believe I can do the work. And I feel a special responsibility to prove them wrong.

The task of a judge is not to make the law – it is to apply the law.

I listened very, very carefully to the world around me to pick up the signals of when trouble was coming. Not that I could stop it. But it made me observant. That was helpful when I became a lawyer, because I knew how to read people’s signals.