Nussbaum Quotes

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

Martha C. Nussbaum

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

Martha C. Nussbaum

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

Martha C. Nussbaum

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The true face of the unions is not now a man in a hard hat as much as it is a woman in a classroom or in cleaning smocks.

Karen Nussbaum

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. There are questions of real power and then there are questions of phony authority. You have to break through the phony authority to begin to fight the real questions of power.

Karen Nussbaum

#11. Embodiment begins with knowing yourself - who you are, what cultures you belong to, and what you want to create in the world.

Bruce Nussbaum

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I'm consistently telling stories about the value of the human condition and connectedness and things like that.

J.H. Wyman

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I know what party you're talking about. I might have to swing through. Especially if you're going to be there in a costume." He winked and leaned back in his seat.
"I'm going as a homeless person."
"Sexy.

Chanelle Gray

#18. The men who have gotten women pregnant need to be accountable if we are. If we are going to jail, the men are coming too. Religious rhetoric will bite its own ass trying to nail only women in a two-person process.

Neko Case

#19. Nudity quickly becomes unremarkable when generally practiced.

Martha C. Nussbaum

#20. 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

#21. Walk your own path and be yourself

Joanne Nussbaum

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

Martha C. Nussbaum

#23. The horse does of two things. He does what he thinks he's supposed to do, or he does what he thinks he needs to do to survive.

Ray Hunt

#24. 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

#25. That's the only reason I'm here. I don't need to play the game for any other reason than to win a championship.

Drew Bledsoe

#26. 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