104 Quotes by Martha Nussbaum

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

It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see 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.

Fear is ubiquitous in human life. It starts in infancy with our primal state of helplessness, where we can see what's going on but we can't move to get it. As we grow older we become a little more able to get what we want but then we're going to die so that gives fear another boost.

I enjoy intellectual companionship.

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.

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.'

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 wake up at night thinking about Euripides' 'Hecuba.' That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.