Quotes from Martha Nussbaum

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.

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

At Chicago I offer a course on Emotion, Reason and the Law that law students just love. But I am not there as a lawyer, my job is to teach philosophy.

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.

The most fertile idea of the Stoics, in my view, is their analysis of emotions as containing evaluative thoughts about what is most important for one's well-being. That view I find basically correct, though in need of a lot of further work. Their normative analysis of the emotions seems wrong to me, namely that we should get rid of them all, but they are pretty on target in their critique of anger.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control."

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

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.

Conception and form are bound together; finding and shaping the words is a matter of finding the appropriate...fit between conception and expression.

Being a human means accepting promises from other people and trusting that other people will be good to you. When that is too much to bear, it is always possible to retreat into the thought, "I'll live for my own comfort, for my own revenge, for my own anger, and I just won't be a member of society anymore." That really means, "I won't be a human being anymore.

Anger is about status injury.