Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.

Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.

Affirmative action is under attack today, not because it has failed, but because it succeeded.

I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.

Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results.

The worst thing about affirmative action is that it encourages reverse discrimination, so-called because it goes in the opposite way of how we naturally discriminate.

The purpose of affirmative action is to give our nation a way to finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent on the basis of their gender, or race from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve and contribute. Affirmative action is an effort to develop systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment, and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced long-standing and persistent discrimination.

I think there are some things that may even be distorted in the practice, such as some affirmative action programs becoming quota systems. And I'm old enough to remember when quotas existed in the United States for the purpose of discrimination, and I don't want to see that happen again.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

Since governmental quotas expand bureaucratic power, provoke a backlash and are unfair to individuals, we need to find a better way to increase minority opportunities.

I don't want affirmative action - too much affirmative, not enough action.

But even race-neutral policies and recruitment efforts designed to achieve greater diversity are, in the end, not race neutral.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

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 still favor alternatives to governmental race-based preferences.

Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.

If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

I don't know what this definition of affirmative action is for some.

I am an affirmative action hire.

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.