Martha Nussbaum

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

“There is no reason why an American scholar cannot by himself or herself develop an adequate understanding of another culture. And I don't find any reason to suppose that the birth within a culture automatically confers understanding.”

“I am not a pacifist - I think that violence and self-defence are often morally justified.”

“Most Americans do really think that Muslims all want to take over and they don't want democracy and they want nothing but Islamic law.”

“The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.”

“I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.”

“As an undergraduate, I studied the Greek and Roman classics, and I went to graduate school in classics intending to work on the presentation of moral issues in various Greek and Roman tragedies.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'”

“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.”

“In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.”

“I think that Muslims are criticised all around the world.”

“People shouldn't be teaching if they break appointments, if they behave in an irresponsible way. I try to be down-to-earth and sensible. I want students to know I'm going to work for all of them and not play favorites and that I'm really going to do my work.”

“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 think Americans did learn that you just are not going to be able to live well if you subordinate people on the grounds of their religion.”

“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.”

“With inheritances, it's really important not to give the impression that you're extorting your children, and one way you can not do that is to make it clear to them that you're not leaving the whole of your estate to them at all, but to various charitable organizations.”