Sonia Sotomayor
My judicial philosophy is fidelity to the law.
I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.
I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.
I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.
Although I grew up in very modest and challenging circumstances, I consider my life to be immeasurably rich.
I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the law. The job of a judge is to apply the law.
I do think there is a value in the services of judges for long periods of time.
I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background or life experiences.
We have to look and ensure that we're paying attention to what we're doing, so that we don't reflexively institute processes and procedures that exclude people without thought.
It is very important when you judge to recognize that you have to stay impartial. That's what the nature of my job is. I have to unhook myself from my emotional responses and try to stay within my unemotional, objective persona.
I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.
To have a romance, you have to have time. I'm a justice. I've written a book. The guy's gonna have to wait until I'm a little bit freer.
I'm young at heart. I'm young in spirit, and I'm still adventurous.
So many people grew up with challenges, as I did. There weren't always happy things happening to me or around me. But when you look at the core of goodness within yourself - at the optimism and hope - you realize it comes from the environment you grew up in.
When you come from a background like mine, where you're entering worlds that are so different than your own, you have to be afraid.
What's quote-unquote a 'good' lawyer, doctor, or whatever the profession is. And if you're a male who grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.
I'm a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them.
I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out.
If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.
It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law.
The first case I sat on... was Citizens United. Talk about being thrown in. Needless to say, if I was scared before, I was terrified.
The schools that suffer are the schools in, in poor neighborhoods. They are the neighborhoods with the greatest need, with the parents struggling to work and to make ends meet. They don't have enough resources to give, they don't have enough resources to pay more, and these are the neighborhoods that go first.
I found in my experiences that it's not that men are consciously discriminating against promoting women, but I do believe as people we have self-images about what's good.
I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me, they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
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.
A career is something that you train for and prepare for and plan on doing for a long time.
I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.
I don't prejudge.
In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.
When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.
Sometimes it gets boring. No justice is supposed to say that. But, you know, there's drudgery in every job you're going to do.
Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.
I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.
I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.
I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.
The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.
Reaching a conclusion has to start with what the parties are arguing, but examining in all situations carefully the facts as they prove them or not prove them, the record as they create it, and then making a decision that is limited to what the law says on the facts before the judge.
All I can say is that with business and the interest of any party before me, I will consider and apply the law as it is written by Congress and informed by precedent.
I have had positive experiences with cameras. When I have been asked to join experiments using cameras in the courtroom, I have participated; I have volunteered.
If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.
I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.
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.
The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way.
With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.
Don't let fear stop you. Don't give up because you are paralyzed by insecurity or overwhelmed by the odds, because in giving up, you give up hope. Understand that failure is a process in life, that only in trying can you enrich yourself and have the possibility of moving forward. The greatest obstacle in life is fear and giving up because of it.Collection: Giving Up
Success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.Collection: Teacher
As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.Collection: Wall
Experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.Collection: Dream
Remember that no one succeeds alone. Never walk alone in your future paths.Collection: Path