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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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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
Able
South
Affirmative
Products
Colleagues
Rican
Succeed
Score
Bronx
Baby
Test
Puerto
Wasn
Product
Princeton
Perfect
Tests
Comparable
Born
Institutions
Scores
Action
Raised
Yale

More quotes by 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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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.
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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It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
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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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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There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy, and how far we want to protect it and from whom.
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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Without question, so many people, throughout my life, never think of Puerto Rico as part of the United States.
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 am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.
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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Even though Article IV of the Constitution says that treaties are the 'supreme law of the land,' in most instances they're not even law.
Sonia Sotomayor
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I had many reasons for writing memoir but among them was the hope that every Latino child and adult would find something familiar in it.
Sonia Sotomayor
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When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.
Sonia Sotomayor
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There are no bystanders in life [...] Our humanity makes us each a part of something greater than ourselves.
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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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.
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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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