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.

Martha Nussbaum

Work Men Good

Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Martha Nussbaum

Knowledge Good Virtual

The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.

Martha Nussbaum

Men Imagination Tie

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Life Your You

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Trust Good Your

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Imagination Art Your

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Work Life Hope

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

Martha Nussbaum

War Ways Way

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

Martha Nussbaum

Fear You Will

We have fear as soon as we are born, we are born into a state of physical helplessness.

Martha Nussbaum

Fear T State

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Work Peace Worked

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

Martha Nussbaum

Violence Us Think

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.'

Martha Nussbaum

Men Great Famous

I wouldn't express anything without being very thoughtful.

Martha Nussbaum

Would Without Wit

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Life God Word

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Good Fear Anger

I don't waste time despising people.

Martha Nussbaum

Time Waste Time Waste

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Art Alone Wit

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Great World Tan

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Society Life Art

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Anger Way Us

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

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

I am very impatient.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

I think that Muslims are criticised all around the world.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

Emotions aren't just mindless urges; they contain thoughts about matters of importance.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

My own students say they don't trust anyone who voted for Trump. How can you have a democracy with that?

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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

Martha Nussbaum

Philanthropy can have a very strong selfish component.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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

Martha Nussbaum

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

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum

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.

Martha Nussbaum