As the dark-haired bird from Bananarama.

For the service I gave to the black folk.

I am flattered and embarassed by all the recent attention to my "Last Lecture." I am told that, including abridged versions, over six million people have viewed the lecture online. The lecture really was for my kids, but if others are finding value in it, that is wonderful. But rest assured; I'm hardly unique. Send your kids to Carnegie Mellon and the other professors here will teach them valuable life lessons long after I'm gone.

Me gustaría que la gente se viera empoderada a construir, a resolver problemas. Que salgamos muchas veces de esa visión de víctimas en la que dependemos de muchas fuerzas. Que veamos problemas como grandes oportunidades para ayudar a resolver. Por ejemplo, frente a esa mala experiencia con los bancos, como me pasó en Brasil, mucha gente se hubiera sentado y quejado del banco. Pero vi una oportunidad gigantesca de ir y competir contra él.

Well, what's very interesting is that those people read our opinions which can be, at moments, rather animated. An animated exchange in writing among the justices. And many people who read our opinions think we have to be at each other's necks constantly. It's interesting we're not. When we're talking about cases at our conference it's generally a conversation. It's really a talk about what our perspectives are and why we have reached the conclusions we've reached.

The second, probably, and I didn’t talk about it in my book, which is always interesting to me, because it didn’t come up within a lesson, okay, within the book teaching me a lesson, but the second was Don Quixote. And that ties in so much to the optimistic part of me, this idea of tilting at windmills, whether they’re real or not. The imagination of them, what fueled that man, that love, that idyllic sort of quest. That can be life sometimes. We don’t always achieve what we end up hoping for. We can work very, very hard at things and come up short. But I take comfort from having dreamt the dream. From having taken the steps, the quest, to undergo the quest of trying to reach them. If at the end you don’t, you’ve had the journey, and I always think the journeys are valuable. They give you lessons, they give you memories. They help you meet people, they help you have an adventure in life. And so for me, that probably, when I’ve read that book, I understood that I was okay. Being optimistic wasn’t a bad thing. It was actually a very good thing.

I think I have been mentored by many extraordinary judges in my career, but there’s one in particular that probably changed the course of my life on the court. And that’s Justice John Paul Stevens and the one year we overlapped.

Because I have to read everything I write and edit it. So I’m not a natural writer. She’s more a natural writer than I am. But I can do what I need to do to give myself enough time to write papers, edit them, before I turn them in.  And that’s what I still do.

And in many, many parts of the world, if you’re going to deprive a parent of custody of their child, you better give them a lawyer. And we don’t. We have an unequal representation of people in our court system. And that does, I think, provide an injustice that we don’t pay enough attention to.

And I didn’t know at that moment what my impact was. I actually fell asleep that night crying. But the next morning, my mother woke us up, and she said she doesn’t remember this dress, but it was a black with white polka dot dress. And her hair was finally properly combed.  She had for the first time in a year some makeup on, and I knew my mom was back. And that may have been one of the happiest moments of my life.