Martha Nussbaum Quotes

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It's a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered.

When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting.

Among the good and decent men, some are unprepared for the surprises of life, and their good intentions run aground when confronted with issues like child care.

Fear is ubiquitous in human life. It starts in infancy with our primal state of helplessness, where we can see what's going on but we can't move to get it. As we grow older we become a little more able to get what we want but then we're going to die so that gives fear another boost.

It's always easier for people to face backward than to face forward.

If you've been betrayed by a spouse or a partner, it's much easier to focus on causing that person pain than it is to turn forward and actually create a life that's worthy of you in the future.

I listen to music. I particularly love Mozart.

Men in particular think that they have achieved something if they can make a woman mad, particularly if she is calm and intellectual.

Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.

People - and I think this is particularly true of Americans - don't like to be passive. They like to seize control.

I wouldn't express anything without being very thoughtful.

My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

As an undergraduate, I studied the Greek and Roman classics, and I went to graduate school in classics intending to work on the presentation of moral issues in various Greek and Roman tragedies.

What all emotions have in common, and what distinguishes them from bodily appetites, is a focus on an object and a view of that object as salient for one's life.

Teaching has always been a very important part of my life. It is one of the ways I contribute to society. It is also a source of energy and insight.

On the whole, the accommodationist position has been dominant in U.S. law and public culture ─ ever since George Washington wrote a famous letter to the Quakers explaining that he would not require them to serve in the military because the 'conscientious scruples of all men' deserve the greatest 'delicacy and tenderness.'

Every time I undress in the locker room of my gym, I see women bearing the scars of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants.

If people think that women only wear the burqa because of coercive pressure, let them create ample opportunities for them, at the same time enforce laws making primary and secondary education compulsory, and then see what women actually do.

Clothing that covers the body can be comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on the fabric. In India I typically wear a full salwaar kameez of cotton, because it is superbly comfortable, and full covering keeps dust off one's limbs and at least diminishes the risk of skin cancer.

It's easy to think that college classes are mainly about preparing you for a job. But remember: this may be the one time in your life when you have a chance to think about the whole of your life, not just your job.

Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.

I don't want to talk about the regulation of financial markets because that is not my sphere of expertise. It's a very complicated topic, and if I have written a number of books they are always on topics that I think I know something about.

The U.S. has always understood itself to be united around political principles and not around culture, whereas the nations of Europe have a much more traditional conception of nationhood that is connected to romanticism, which thinks of religion and culture as ingredients of nationhood.

It's always been intriguing to me, the loveability of mortality.

We see unreasoning fear driving a certain amount of public policy, perhaps more in Europe than in the U.S.

I am very impatient.

When I was four I joined a group of girls who were talking about their party dresses. I thought they were imagining, so I imagined a fantastic pink velvet dress with lots of jewels. But they were simply describing what they actually wore, and they had utter contempt for my obvious fiction. After that, I never joined a group again.

I don't waste time despising people.

I'd like to be a student in Rabindranath Tagore's school in Santiniketan in around 1915, dancing in the dance-dramas he wrote.

In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.

You have to address anger, fear, and then to think about what the alternatives are: hope, faith, a certain kind of brotherly love. And then you have to set yourself to cultivate those.

I think a lot of people get hope through civic organizations and through their churches.

And I sometimes find that members of my family are reading completely different news from what I'm reading, because they're not reading general interest newspapers at all. They're getting all their news from certain Internet sites that are rather political.

Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.

Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.

Disgust for the female body is always tinged with anxiety, since the body symbolizes mortality.

American men do have genuine reasons for anxiety. The traditional jobs that many men have filled are disappearing, thanks to automation and outsourcing. The jobs that remain require, in most cases, higher education, which is increasingly difficult for non-affluent families to afford.

When we feel helpless later in life, fear makes us scapegoat others. Instead of fixing the problems, we say, 'Oh, it's all their fault - those women or immigrants are infesting our country.' Rather than useful protest or constructive solutions, we get angry at these handy targets.

This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.

Men are angry at women because they aren't doing what they are supposed to do, which is support men. They are in the workplace claiming their own rights and often outdoing men. They are daring to bring charges of sexual assault and harassment. They are just not behaving themselves!

Fear requires belief that you will be harmed, and it is easily manipulated by rhetoric.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

There were several men who had blazed the trail for talking about emotions in philosophy; otherwise my work would have had even more opposition than it did.

I can run a long distance very slowly and I do a half marathon every year.

I'm very passionate about political issues, but I also think that listening to people who disagree is extremely important, and I try to build that into my teaching, sometimes by co-teaching with rightwing colleagues.

If you look into the religions, they have this deep idea of human dignity and the source of dignity being conscience.

I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.

There's nothing illogical, it seems to me, about saying, 'I am going to care deeply about my work and my writing. I'm also going to care deeply about my family and my child.'

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

I wake up at night thinking about Euripides' 'Hecuba.' That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.

I am not a pacifist - I think that violence and self-defence are often morally justified.

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