Top 40 Irin Carmon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

— Irin Carmon

2. “Always be independent.”

— Irin Carmon

3. “My mother-in-law meant simply this,” RBG said. “Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing – to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.”

— Irin Carmon

4. “RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.”

— Irin Carmon

5. “Law should be a literary profession,′ RGB says, ’and the best legal practioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.”

— Irin Carmon

6. “The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.”

— Irin Carmon

7. “Generally, change in our society is incremental, I think. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

— Irin Carmon

8. “After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.”

— Irin Carmon

9. “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity,” she said simply. “It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

— Irin Carmon

10. “Anyway, hope springs eternal. If I lose today, there’s hope that tomorrow will be better.” – RBG, 2012.”

— Irin Carmon

11. “RBG’s longtime friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein says, “I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.”

— Irin Carmon

12. “She is painstaking in presenting facts, on the theory that the truth is weapon enough.”

— Irin Carmon

13. “She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real.”

— Irin Carmon

14. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels,” the president said. “Having experienced discrimination,” he added, “she devoted the next twenty years of her career to fighting it and making this country a better place for our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters.” RBG would have added, “And our husbands, our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.”

— Irin Carmon

15. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” – Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls.”

— Irin Carmon

16. “As of this writing, no one has come up with a male counterpart to “schoolmarmish.”

— Irin Carmon

17. “Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny,” RBG said. “I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.”

— Irin Carmon

18. “RBG’s old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice’s image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem’s own long-standing observation: “Women lose power with age, and men gain it.” Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else.”

— Irin Carmon

19. “When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG’s black robe, it’s bad news for liberals. That’s her dissent collar.”

— Irin Carmon

20. “For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: ‘When there are nine.”

— Irin Carmon

21. “A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.”

— Irin Carmon

22. “Suddenly, she felt the ground steady under her. These men, the most important judges in the country, were her captive audience for the next ten minutes. RBG knew so much more about the case and the topic than they did. She had to teach them. She knew how to do that. RBG had been teaching law for almost a decade.”

— Irin Carmon

23. “Actually, there is no biological connection whatsoever between the function of giving birth to and nursing a child and the function of washing its clothes, preparing its food, and trying to bring it up to be a good and harmonious person,” Moberg wrote. “Both men and women have one main role: that of being human beings.”

— Irin Carmon

24. “RBG has never been one to shrink from a challenge. People who think she is hanging on to this world by a thread underestimate her. RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.”

— Irin Carmon

25. “Read closely, it very gently suggested the majority was being a bunch of arrogant hypocrites, who had checked their commitment to states’ rights at the door when it served the Republican party.”

— Irin Carmon

26. “When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.”

— Irin Carmon

27. “Someday, we will go back to having the kind of legislature that we should, where members, whatever party they belong to, want to make the thing work and cooperate with each other to see that that will happen.”

— Irin Carmon

28. “He’s never been in awe of anybody. He wooed and won her by convincing her how much he respected her.”

— Irin Carmon

29. “So that is one very important thing – how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work – but I can’t do without my secretaries.”

— Irin Carmon

30. “So when RBG was asked how she had managed to have such an extraordinary marriage, she often answered by saying that Marty himself was extraordinary, and he saw the same in her.”

— Irin Carmon

31. “RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf.”

— Irin Carmon

32. “Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself – a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.”

— Irin Carmon

33. “August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.”

— Irin Carmon

34. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

— Irin Carmon

35. “When she left the library, RBG knew this much: Her days of quiet acceptance were over.”

— Irin Carmon

36. “RBG has never been very interested in drawing attention to herself without a good reason. That’s how you know that when she does send up smoke signals, something has gone very wrong.”

— Irin Carmon

37. “Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy. They’re not productive and don’t get you anyplace, so get over it.”

— Irin Carmon

38. “I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me. It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.” – Marty Ginsburg, 1993.”

— Irin Carmon

39. “There’s full marriage and then there’s sort of skim milk marriage.”

— Irin Carmon

40. “RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time.”

— Irin Carmon

41. “She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.”

— Irin Carmon

42. “RBG’s most famous words in the Hobby Lobby dissent could have appeared in any of her searing dissents: “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

— Irin Carmon

43. “RBG saw injustice in the world and she used her abilities to help change it.”

— Irin Carmon

44. “Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.”

— Irin Carmon

45. “I’m going to tell you the secret of a happy marriage: It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” In her outstretched hand were a pair of earplugs.”

— Irin Carmon