Sandra Day O'Connor

I need to retire from retirement.

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.

The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy.

The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy. The problem comes when healthy criticism is replaced with more destructive intimidation and sanctions.

As a citizen, you need to know how to be a part of it, how to express yourself - and not just by voting.

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.

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

In terms of having the American people look at the court and think of it as being fair and appropriate for our nation, it helps to have women, plural, on the court.

And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer.

Half the states have stopped making civics and government a requirement for high school. Half.

Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values.

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.