When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

Sonia Sotomayor

Home Age Your

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

Sonia Sotomayor

Society Equality Education

We apply law to facts. We don't apply feelings to facts.

Sonia Sotomayor

T Law La

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.

Sonia Sotomayor

Life Hope Experience

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

Sonia Sotomayor

History Where Ways

I do know one thing about me: I don't measure myself by others' expectations or let others define my worth.

Sonia Sotomayor

Worth Thing Thin

The Latina in me is an ember that blazes forever.

Sonia Sotomayor

Tina Tin T

There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested. Whether it's serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unexpected strengths.

Sonia Sotomayor

Strength Who Whether

I have never, ever focused on the negative of things. I always look at the positive.

Sonia Sotomayor

Positive Ways Way

My diabetes is such a central part of my life... it did teach me discipline... it also taught me about moderation... I've trained myself to be super-vigilant... because I feel better when I am in control.

Sonia Sotomayor

Life Art Vigilant

I have never had to face anything that could overwhelm the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.

Sonia Sotomayor

Wit Tim Thing

I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences. Today is one of those experiences.

Sonia Sotomayor

Experience Wit Who

I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.

Sonia Sotomayor

Morning Art Yorker

We educated, privileged lawyers have a professional and moral duty to represent the underrepresented in our society, to ensure that justice exists for all, both legal and economic justice.

Sonia Sotomayor

Society Legal Vile

I firmly believe in the rule of law as the foundation for all of our basic rights.

Sonia Sotomayor

UN T Rule Of Law

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

Us Ted T

The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.

Sonia Sotomayor

Task T Make

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

Work War Time

You know, failure hurts. Any kind of failure stings. If you live in the sting, you will - undoubtedly - fail. My way of getting past the sting is to say no, I'm just not going to let this get me down.

Sonia Sotomayor

Failure You Will

If your child marches to a different beat, a different drummer, you might just have to go along with that music. Help them achieve what's important to them.

Sonia Sotomayor

Music Your You

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

Sonia Sotomayor

Experience Wit Who

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

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

I'm young at heart. I'm young in spirit, and I'm still adventurous.

Sonia Sotomayor

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

Sonia Sotomayor

I think it's important to move people beyond just dreaming into doing. They have to be able to see that you are just like them, and you made it.

Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

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

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

Sonia Sotomayor

My judicial philosophy is fidelity to the law.

Sonia Sotomayor

Diabetes taught me discipline.

Sonia Sotomayor

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.

Sonia Sotomayor

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

If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it. I have faith in the process of the law, and if it is carried out fairly, I can live with the results, whatever they may be.

Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

Sonia Sotomayor

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

Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

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

I savor life. When you have anything that threatens life... it prods you into stepping back and really appreciating the value of life and taking from it what you can.

Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.

Sonia Sotomayor

I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income, because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all. I have no right to complain.

Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

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

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