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Sonia Sotomayor Inspirational Quotes (93)

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I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences, but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I don't have a professional aspiration. But I do have a personal one: I want to continue growing as a person. I want to reach out more to people, learn more from them. Ultimately, I would like to be a great justice that people remember with respect and fondness.
Sonia Sotomayor
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Don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I was raised in a Bronx public housing project, but studied at two of the nation's finest universities. I did work as an assistant district attorney, prosecuting violent crimes that devastate our communities.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I accept the proposition that...“to judge is an exercise of power” and because...“there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives – no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I come to every case with an open mind. Every case is new to me.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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Remember that no one succeeds alone. Never walk alone in your future paths.
Sonia Sotomayor
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A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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
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I didn't know I had a sense of limitation until I got into the greater world.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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
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People who live in difficult circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible. Page 1.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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Success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.
Sonia Sotomayor
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This wealth of experiences, personal and professional, have helped me appreciate the variety of perspectives that present themselves in every case that I hear.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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