Quotes from Martha Nussbaum

This is my Achilles heel. If some Internet technician is on the phone with me and he's being irrational and incompetent and stupid, I get really mad and I can sort of feel my blood pressure going up.

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

All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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 think that it's rational to fear your own death or to fear harm to your family.

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.

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

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.

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!

The dignity of these humans is to weep.

Do not despise your inner world.

The ability to detect fallacy is one of the things that makes democratic life decent.

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

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

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.

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

There's nothing illogical, it seems to me, about saying, 'I am going to care deeply about my work and my writing. I'm also going to care deeply about my family and my child.'

I am very impatient.