There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action – to try to balance out those effects. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
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. Sonia Sotomayor Read Quote
