. . . But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is instirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize That the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today.

Same way I have my entire life. Keep my family and friends close. My Latino friends close. I visit the island [Puerto Rico] as often as I humanly can.

I think being a Catholic made me a better person. It taught me how to choose good over evil, and how to be a more caring human being.

To me, lawyering is the height of service - and being involved in this profession is a gift.

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.

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

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 - 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.