Zitat des Tages von Sandra Day O'Connor:
We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.
Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.
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.
It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.
There was no hostility at the court when I arrived.
Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values.
The fact is, we are a nine-member court that sits on cases.
The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.
The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy. The problem comes when healthy criticism is replaced with more destructive intimidation and sanctions.
I'm a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it's terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don't like.
It is true that as you have children, there are a good many months when you don't want to be working full-time. I agree that that's an issue.
I care very much about women and their progress. I didn't go march in the streets, but when I was in the Arizona Legislature, one of the things that I did was to examine every single statute in the state of Arizona to pick out the ones that discriminated against women and get them changed.
My concern was whether I could do the job of a justice well enough to convince the nation that my appointment was the right move.
I sort of thought the framers of the Constitution were talking about the rights of individuals, not corporate entities.
What was a problem was the excessive amount of media attention to the appointment of the first woman and everything she did. Everywhere that Sandra went, the press was sure to go. And that got tiresome; it was stressful.
The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.
I tried to decide each case based on the law and the Constitution.
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.
It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.
The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.
When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.
I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a resurgence of civic-mindedness in this country. Hopefully the younger generations, which came out in record numbers during the last presidential election, will pass their enthusiasm on to their children.
It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.
Having family responsibilities and concerns just has to make you a more understanding person.
Yes, I will bring the understanding of a woman to the Court, but I doubt that alone will affect my decisions.
The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person's standing in the political community.
Occasionally we have to interpret an international treaty - one, perhaps, affecting airlines and liability for injury to passengers or damage to goods. Then, of course, we have to look to the precedents of other member nations in resolving issues.
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.
I don't know that there are any short cuts to doing a good job.
The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn't a woman in the United States who didn't write me a letter on one side or the other of that issue.
Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.
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.
Half the states have stopped making civics and government a requirement for high school. Half.
If you take a position under the Constitution that is against the majority view, you have to explain it well enough that maybe you can persuade some of that majority to agree with you.
The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men's and women's earnings for the same work.
We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.