Martha C. Nussbaum Quotes & Sayings

Nudity quickly becomes unremarkable when generally practiced. — Martha C. Nussbaum

But the life that no longer trust another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person's eyes or to experience that person's feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination. — Martha C. Nussbaum

The presence of the other, which can be very threatening, becomes, in play, a delightful source of curiosity, and this curiosity contributes toward the development of healthy attitudes in friendship, love, and, later, political life. Winnicott — Martha C. Nussbaum

This tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world. This model of education supplanted an older one in which children sat still at desks all day and simply absorbed, and then regurgitated, the material that was brought their way. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior. — Martha C. Nussbaum

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics. — Martha C. Nussbaum

You can't really change the heart without telling a story. — Martha C. Nussbaum

We might say that there can be pity in its full-fledged form only where there is also mercy for self: for the self engulfed by a sense of its own utter blackness can never win through to a sufficient recognition of the sorrows of the other as other. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. — Martha C. Nussbaum

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment ... Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it. — Martha C. Nussbaum

An education is truly "fitted for freedom" only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Conception and form are bound together; finding and shaping the words is a matter of finding the appropriate...fit between conception and expression. — Martha C. Nussbaum

This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness - only love can make it end in happiness and joy. - W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) — Martha C. Nussbaum

What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them? — Martha C. Nussbaum

EPICURUS WROTE, "Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul. — Martha C. Nussbaum

We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the "concerned reader of a novel," understanding each person's life as a "complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles. — Martha C. Nussbaum

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility. — Martha C. Nussbaum

It seems to me that good philosophy will always have a place in the investigation of any matter of deep human importance, because of its commitment to clarity, to carefully drawn distinctions, to calm argument rather than prejudice and dogmatic assertion"
"Philosophical Interventions" (Reviews 1986-2011) — Martha C. Nussbaum

In our swamp of media sensationalism and group-speak, BOSTON REVIEW stands out as a bold voice for reason and argument, one of the very, very few places that offers intelligence, integrity, and variety. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions. — Martha C. Nussbaum

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. — Martha C. Nussbaum

But it is to the school that Tagore devotes central emphasis in The Religion of Man.14 He begins by expressing his lifelong dissatisfaction with the schools he attended: "The inexpensive power to be happy, which, along with other children, I brought to this world, was being constantly worn away by friction with the brick-and-mortar arrangement of life, by monotonously mechanical habits and the customary code of respectability" (144). In effect, children begin as madcap Bauls, full of love, longing, and joy in the presence of nature. Their love of play and their questioning spirit need to be strengthened, not crushed. But schools usually crush all that is disorderly, — Martha C. Nussbaum

Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced. — Martha C. Nussbaum