Martha Nussbaum Quotes

#1. They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.

Edwidge Danticat

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. He'd been sticking his neck out, which is literally the stupidest thing I can imagine anyone doing when it comes to vampires. That ought to be Rule Number One For Dealing With Vampires, right there. Don't stick your neck out!

Cherie Priest

#5. You can't really change the heart without telling a story.

Martha C. Nussbaum

#6. 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

#7. This civilization is the impact of the world's consumption behavior.

Toba Beta

#8. Nudity quickly becomes unremarkable when generally practiced.

Martha C. Nussbaum

#9. You deserve a great life. I want to see you become unreasonably happy. And you can. And you will.

Hill Harper

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. You might not be riding high on a great show for as long because you didn't have people to share the joy with.

Aoife O'Donovan

#13. What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

Martha C. Nussbaum

#14. I think you're bound to feel guilty, and you're going to feel sad. You have to simply feel it. Don't hate yourself. It is what it is.

Mhairi McFarlane

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. We need to be both conscious and competent to design products that emulate nature's life cycles, making sure that they endure and are either recycled or absorbed.

Guilherme Leal

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced.

Martha C. Nussbaum

#24. Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Martha C. Nussbaum