Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

There are as many forms of advice as there are colors of the rainbow. Remember that good advice can come from bad people and bad advice from good people. The important thing about advice is that it is simply that. Advice.

It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

Two people can look at the same thing and see it differently.

I hear, Western people say, "The world was created for us." If tigers could write books, they would say, man was created for them and that man is a most sinful animal, because he does not allow him (the tiger) to catch him easily. The worm that crawls under your feet today is a God to be.

If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event. So the dimensions of it will be seen differently by different people.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We all are raised by straight people and grow up with straight people and in straight families, but we all have this totally other way of looking at things. Increasingly as I get deeper into middle age, that is why I resist plunking for any one camp. Because I have this delicious sort of experience of being able to see things in two ways.

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.

The truth isn't all things to all people all of the time.

each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

I never try to guess what anyone else will take from a movie. Every movie is such a different experience for each and every person. I don't like it when people try telling people what they should take from a movie. You should go see it with fresh eyes and see for themselves.

It isn't so much what's on the table that matters, as what's on the chairs.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don't.

Interest which blinds some People, enlightens others.

I can't tell you about acting. You can develop all the skills, voice, gesture, movement, you can develop by exercise and practice but finally fundamentally it's mining from yourself, from your own personality, from what you know. If you can't know it you can have a good guess by people you know or books you've read.

If one meets a powerful person - Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates - ask them five questions: 'What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?' If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action.