The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried. – Sandra Day O’Connor
The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn’t a woman in the United States who didn’t write me a letter on one side or the other of that issue. – Sandra Day O’Connor
I care very much about women and their progress. I didn’t go march in the streets, but when I was in the Arizona Legislature, one of the things that I did was to examine every single statute in the state of Arizona to pick out the ones that discriminated against women and get them changed. – Sandra Day O’Connor
Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances. – Sandra Day O’Connor
My hope is that 10 years from now, after I’ve been across the street at work for a while, they’ll all be glad they gave me that wonderful vote. – Sandra Day O’Connor
Apparently a great many people have forgotten that the framers of our Constitution went to such great effort to create an independent judicial branch that would not be subject to retaliation by either the executive branch or the legislative branch because of some decision made by those judges. – Sandra Day O’Connor
Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don’t know how much history young women today know about those battles. – Sandra Day O’Connor
You have citizens who don’t understand how government works and they’re kind of soured on it. All they do is criticize. They have no idea that they can make things happen. – Sandra Day O’Connor
Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom. – Sandra Day O’Connor
When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn’t do it. – Sandra Day O’Connor
Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents. – Sandra Day O’Connor
The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy. – Sandra Day O’Connor
The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person’s standing in the political community. – Sandra Day O’Connor
It is a measure of the framers’ fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself. – Sandra Day O’Connor
I loved my husband very much, and it was heartbreaking to have him develop Alzheimer’s disease, and to stand by and watch him decline in his ability to take care of himself. – Sandra Day O’Connor
I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation’s schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it’s unfortunate. – Sandra Day O’Connor
I’m a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it’s terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don’t like. – Sandra Day O’Connor
It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That’s set out in the Constitution. – Sandra Day O’Connor
Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values. – Sandra Day O’Connor
It is true that as you have children, there are a good many months when you don’t want to be working full-time. I agree that that’s an issue. – Sandra Day O’Connor