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Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.

Sonia Sotomayor

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Sonia Sotomayor
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 25
Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Judge
Lawyer
Politician
University Teacher
The Bronx
New York City
Sonia Maria Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor
Differences
Origins
Whether
Inherent
Born
Affected
Experience
Cultural
May
Gender
Make
National
Judging
Difference
Physiological

More quotes by Sonia Sotomayor

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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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As you may know from my life story, my cousin who was my soul mate went to a public school. And he died of AIDS. Would I and my brother have been able to resist the lure of drugs in the surrounding schools? Who knows.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I hope in my book [My Beloved World], that the sense that I really feel connected comes through.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I savor life. When you have anything that threatens life... it prods you into stepping back and really appreciating the value of life and taking from it what you can.
Sonia Sotomayor
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The best I could say about third grade was that it was a more or less continuous state of dread.
Sonia Sotomayor
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No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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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The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.
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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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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I've spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me.
Sonia Sotomayor
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It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
Sonia Sotomayor
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A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.
Sonia Sotomayor
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If your child marches to a different beat, a different drummer, you might just have to go along with that music. Help them achieve what’s important to them.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I got a message from one of my friends in Puerto Rico, who said, 'Sonia, there's nobody working in Puerto Rico - they're all glued to the television'. And I got a similar message from a friend in Spain.
Sonia Sotomayor
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Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.
Sonia Sotomayor
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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.
Sonia Sotomayor