Martha Nussbaum

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

In my experience and observation, senior appointments are rarely based entirely on merit.

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

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.

I am very impatient.

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.

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

I listen to music. I particularly love Mozart.

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.

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

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.

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

People shouldn't be teaching if they break appointments, if they behave in an irresponsible way. I try to be down-to-earth and sensible. I want students to know I'm going to work for all of them and not play favorites and that I'm really going to do my work.

I love fashion, and I simply enjoy good design in clothes and regard that as one of my hobbies.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Well, I'm trained as a classicist, so I like to read the Greeks and Romans.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't express anything without being very thoughtful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I really disliked Philadelphia society - really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.