Quotes By Sandra Day O..Connor

And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer.

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.

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.

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents.

As a citizen, you need to know how to be a part of it, how to express yourself - and not just by voting.

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.

The members of the court were just delighted to have a ninth member - male or female. They were all kind and welcoming.

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.

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 is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.

You have citizens who don't understand how government works and they're kind of soured on it. All they do is criticize. They have no idea that they can make things happen.

A moment of silence is not inherently religious.

Well, it's a little odd, the path I took, because when I was young, I wanted to be a cattle rancher. That was what I knew and that was what I liked.

I think the important thing about my appointment is not that I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases.

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.

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.

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.

In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.

I need to retire from retirement.

I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.

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.