Quotes from Martha Nussbaum

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.

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

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.

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.

I enjoy intellectual companionship.

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

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.

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

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.

I thought as an actress I would be able to have broader emotional experiences, but then I quickly figured out that I wanted to think about tragic dramas, not act in them.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Mob rule is always extremely dangerous for the future of democracy.

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

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

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.

I listen to music. I particularly love Mozart.