Top 120 Sonia Sotomayor Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Don’t be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

54. “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

55. “I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

56. “I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

57. “Without question, so many people, throughout my life, never think of Puerto Rico as part of the United States. Many people have no idea what the relationship is between Puerto Rico and the United States. And certainly, I have been asked if we are citizens.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

58. “To me, lawyering is the height of service – and being involved in this profession is a gift.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

59. “The task of a judge is not to make the law – it is to apply the law.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

60. “Although I grew up in very modest and challenging circumstances, I consider my life to be immeasurably rich.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

61. “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

62. “Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in Heaven. To succeed in this world you have to be known to people.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

63. “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

64. “I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

65. “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

66. “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

67. “As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

68. “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

69. “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

70. “I realized that people had an unreal image of me, that somehow I was a god on Mount Olympus. I decided that if I were going to make use of my role as a Supreme Court Justice, it would be to inspire people to realize that, first, I was just like them and second, if I could do it, so could they.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

71. “I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

72. “I would warn any minority student today against the temptations of self-segregation: take support and comfort from your own group as you can, but don’t hide within it.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

73. “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it’s the law.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

78. “In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

79. “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

80. “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

81. “I don’t believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

82. “What’s quote-unquote a ‘good’ lawyer, doctor, or whatever the profession is. And if you’re a male who grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

83. “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

84. “I want to state upfront, unequivocally and without doubt: I do not believe that any racial, ethnic or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge, regardless of their background or life experiences.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

85. “That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could acomplish. Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

86. “I’ve never had my dexterity called into question, but I think if that was ever the case, I could acquit myself by tossing a ball back and forth horizontally between my hands.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

87. “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

88. “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

89. “I come to every case with an open mind. Every case is new to me.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

90. “All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

91. “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

92. “I have had positive experiences with cameras. When I have been asked to join experiments using cameras in the courtroom, I have participated; I have volunteered.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

93. “I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

94. “All I can say is that with business and the interest of any party before me, I will consider and apply the law as it is written by Congress and informed by precedent.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

95. “I’m a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

96. “I listened very, very carefully to the world around me to pick up the signals of when trouble was coming. Not that I could stop it. But it made me observant. That was helpful when I became a lawyer, because I knew how to read people’s signals.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

97. “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

98. “The best I could say about third grade was that it was a more or less continuous state of dread.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

99. “I do think there is a value in the services of judges for long periods of time.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

100. “I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I’d have to develop for myself.”

— Sonia Sotomayor