Quotes from Sonia Sotomayor

When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.

I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.

The schools that suffer are the schools in, in poor neighborhoods. They are the neighborhoods with the greatest need, with the parents struggling to work and to make ends meet. They don't have enough resources to give, they don't have enough resources to pay more, and these are the neighborhoods that go first.

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.

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.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Diabetes taught me discipline.

We have to look and ensure that we're paying attention to what we're doing, so that we don't reflexively institute processes and procedures that exclude people without thought.

Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.

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.

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.

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