Quotes from Sonia Sotomayor

Although wisdom is built on life experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.

I'm young at heart. I'm young in spirit, and I'm still adventurous.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

My job as a prosecutor is to do justice. And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.

I think it's important to move people beyond just dreaming into doing. They have to be able to see that you are just like them, and you made it.

You know, failure hurts. Any kind of failure stings. If you live in the sting, you will - undoubtedly - fail. My way of getting past the sting is to say no, I'm just not going to let this get me down.

My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.

I do know one thing about me: I don't measure myself by others' expectations or let others define my worth.

Until we reach equality in education, we can't reach equality in the larger society.

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.

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.

Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.

It is our responsibility to explain to the public how an often unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized, but always evolving, society.

I realized that people had an unreal image of me, that somehow I was a god on Mount Olympus. I decided that if I were going to make use of my role as a Supreme Court Justice, it would be to inspire people to realize that, first, I was just like them and second, if I could do it, so could they.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

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.

I don't prejudge issues. I come to every case with an open mind. Every case is new to me.

There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested. Whether it's serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unexpected strengths.

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.

Since I have difficulty defining merit and what merit alone means - and in any context, whether it's judicial or otherwise - I accept that different experiences in and of itself, bring merit to the system.

I have never had to face anything that could overwhelm the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.

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.

A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.