Quotes from Sonia Sotomayor

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

Being a justice. If you love law the way I do... you're given the job of a lifetime... you're permitted to address the most important legal questions of the country, and sometimes the world. And in doing so, you make a difference in people's lives.

I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.

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.

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.

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'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.

My mom loved the book [My beloved world] and she said to me, 'I never knew you had done so much.'

The challenges I have faced - among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother - are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.

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.

My judicial philosophy is fidelity to the law.

Oh my God, I don't think you can say anyone looks forward to controversy.

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.

If I go home, get a gun, come back and shoot you, that may not be legal under New York law because you would have alternative ways to defend.

I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.

I had many reasons for writing memoir but among them was the hope that every Latino child and adult would find something familiar in it.

It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law.

This wealth of experiences, personal and professional, have helped me appreciate the variety of perspectives that present themselves in every case that I hear.

I have never, ever focused on the negative of things. I always look at the positive.

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.

We educated, privileged lawyers have a professional and moral duty to represent the underrepresented in our society, to ensure that justice exists for all, both legal and economic justice.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

There are no bystanders in life [...] Our humanity makes us each a part of something greater than ourselves.

All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.