America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue... — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus' famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

Author: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Insight: There's a particular kind of discomfort in recognizing the gap between a nation's self-image and its lived reality. Ginsburg isn't being naive here—she's naming something Americans genuinely believe about themselves, while also drawing attention to how far short we've often fallen. The Statue of Liberty and Lazarus's words represent an ideal that has real power, not because it's always been true, but because it keeps pulling us toward something better. What makes this observation stick today is that it works both ways. When we ignore the gap entirely—pretending discrimination doesn't exist—we abandon the promise. But when we only see the gap and forget the aspiration, we risk becoming cynical about improvement itself. Ginsburg seems to be doing something trickier: holding both at once. She's saying that America's founding mythology matters precisely because we haven't lived up to it yet, and that acknowledging this gap is actually patriotic, not un-American. The practical tension this creates is real. Do we celebrate how far we've come, or confront how far we still have to go? The answer, uncomfortable as it is, might be that we have to do both simultaneously—honoring the ideal without letting it let us off the hook.

Source: Remarks by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Naturalization Ceremony, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria, Virginia, October 9, 2015