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.

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.

If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.

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.

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

I don't know that there are any short cuts to doing a good job.

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.

I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a resurgence of civic-mindedness in this country. Hopefully the younger generations, which came out in record numbers during the last presidential election, will pass their enthusiasm on to their children.

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.

The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.

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.

In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.

The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men's and women's earnings for the same work.

Well, it's a little odd, the path I took, because when I was young, I wanted to be a cattle rancher. That was what I knew and that was what I liked.

The fact is, we are a nine-member court that sits on cases.

Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has.

Having family responsibilities and concerns just has to make you a more understanding person.

We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation.

My concern was whether I could do the job of a justice well enough to convince the nation that my appointment was the right move.

What was a problem was the excessive amount of media attention to the appointment of the first woman and everything she did. Everywhere that Sandra went, the press was sure to go. And that got tiresome; it was stressful.

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.

Justice Ginsburg is a very competent justice, and it is a joy to have her on the court, but particularly for me it is a pleasure to have a second woman 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.

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.

There was no hostility at the court when I arrived.