Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.
Martha Nussbaum
The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.
Every single university student should study philosophy. You need to lead the examined life and question your beliefs. If you don't learn critical thinking, then political debate degenerates into a contest of slogans.
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.
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.
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.
It's always easier for people to face backward than to face forward.
Fear requires belief that you will be harmed, and it is easily manipulated by rhetoric.
We have fear as soon as we are born, we are born into a state of physical helplessness.
When I am disgusted by certain American politicians, I fantasize moving away to Finland - a country in which I have worked a little, and which I see as a pure blue and green place of unpolluted lakes, peaceful forests, and pristine social-democratic values.
I am not a pacifist - I think that violence and self-defence are often morally justified.
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.'
I wouldn't express anything without being very thoughtful.
We are not just bundles of atoms being pushed around. But, there's something spiritual about us whether we give that a religious interpretation or not. And so, it's that sense of there being dignity to life that I associate with the word God. I mean, that's probably a pretty radical and agnostic way of interpreting it. But, that's what I think.
Some emotions are essential to law and to public principles of justice: anger at wrongdoing, fear for our safety, compassion for the pain of others, all these are good reasons to make laws that protect people in their rights.
I don't waste time despising people.
Gandhi, when he was on the salt march, had everyone singing the song of Rabindranath Tagore, which goes, 'Walk alone, walk alone...' Now there's some paradox in that, with a million people on the march! But he was cultivating the thought that each individual has dignity, and the dignity consists partly in the willingness to stand up to authority.
Politicians are at a great distance from the academic world. Barack Obama was my colleague at Chicago - but could i ever talk to him now? Never.
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.
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.
In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.
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.
Martin Luther King and Gandhi were not people who failed in self-respect. They were people of hope and great courage, and their courage was disciplined.
I think Americans did learn that you just are not going to be able to live well if you subordinate people on the grounds of their religion.
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.
I am very impatient.
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.
You have to connect your work to what people are doing. A good way is to construct a bridge between theory and practice - Amartya Sen and I tried this by founding the Human Development and Capabilities Association where practitioners meet theoreticians and their discourse influences practice.
I think that Muslims are criticised all around the world.
The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.
Emotions aren't just mindless urges; they contain thoughts about matters of importance.
I think ageing is challenging, surprising, fun, and full of friendship, so that is the approach I'll take, objecting to the stigmatization of ageing in so many modern societies.
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.
My own students say they don't trust anyone who voted for Trump. How can you have a democracy with that?
Hilary Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89. Those of us who had the good fortune to know Putnam as mentees, colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound gratitude and love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a human being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be themselves, not his acolytes.
Every time I undress in the locker room of my gym, I see women bearing the scars of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants.
Fear and monarchy pair nicely. But democracy means you have to work with people you may not like but you must still believe are your equals. And a fearful people never trust the other side.
Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.
I have spent a lot of my career working on normative political philosophy, developing the 'capabilities approach' to social justice. I have also spent a lot of my career working on the structure of the emotions, and their role in human life.
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.
I'd like to be a student in Rabindranath Tagore's school in Santiniketan in around 1915, dancing in the dance-dramas he wrote.
Philanthropy can have a very strong selfish component.
I worked among many famous philosophers, and I tried to observe how they treated students. I knew which ones I wanted to be like, and which ones I didn't.
To be sure Plato did not favor 'affirmative action' to fill political and military offices in his own society; nor did he enroll women in his school.
I think a lot of people get hope through civic organizations and through their churches.
At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'
Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.
There is no reason why an American scholar cannot by himself or herself develop an adequate understanding of another culture. And I don't find any reason to suppose that the birth within a culture automatically confers understanding.
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.
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.
