Nussbaum Quotes

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

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.

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, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced.

We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the “concerned reader of a novel,” understanding each person’s life as a “complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.

You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

Play teaches people to be capable of living with others without control; it connects the experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety. How

This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness—only love can make it end in happiness and joy. —W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786)

It seems to me that good philosophy will always have a place in the investigation of any matter of deep human importance, because of its commitment to clarity, to carefully drawn distinctions, to calm argument rather than prejudice and dogmatic assertion" "Philosophical Interventions" (Reviews 1986-2011)

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

The presence of the other, which can be very threatening, becomes, in play, a delightful source of curiosity, and this curiosity contributes toward the development of healthy attitudes in friendship, love, and, later, political life. Winnicott

What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder.

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.

An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.

To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It's based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

For a choice is always a choice among possible alternatives; and it is a rare agent for whom everything is possible. The special agony of this situation is that none of the possibilities is even harmless.

We might say that there can be pity in its full-fledged form only where there is also mercy for self: for the self engulfed by a sense of its own utter blackness can never win through to a sufficient recognition of the sorrows of the other as other.

This tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world. This model of education supplanted an older one in which children sat still at desks all day and simply absorbed, and then regurgitated, the material that was brought their way.

Anger is about status injury.

Martha Nussbaum tiene razón cuando sostiene que la educación no nos libra necesariamente de los peores comportamientos..., pero la ignorancia los asegura.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

All women live in sexual objectification the way fish swim in water.

Walk your own path and be yourself

Do not despise your inner world.

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics.

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.

Decent people sometimes create bad art. Amoral people can and have created transcendent works. A cruel and selfish person—a criminal, even—might make something that was generous, life-giving, and humane. Or alternatively, they might create something that was grotesque in a way that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from it, full of contradictions that were themselves magnetic.

Once you laugh with a person? That person is your friend.

The dignity of these humans is to weep.

When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate: use the numbers directly.

Here, I believe, was mercy; and, lying very close to it, the root of the novelist’s art. The novel’s structure is a structure of suggnômê—of the penetration of the life of another into one’s own imagination and heart. It is a form of imaginative and emotional receptivity, in which the reader, following the author’s lead, comes to be inhabited by the tangled complexities and struggles of other concrete lives.54 Novels do not withhold all moral judgment, and they contain villains as well as heroes. But for any character with whom the form invites our participatory identification, the motives for mercy are engendered in the structure of literary perception itself. VII.

The problems that globalization and automation create for working-class Americans are real, deep, and seemingly intractable. Rather than face those difficulties and uncertainties, people who sense their living standard declining can instead grasp after villains, and a fantasy takes shape: if “we” can somehow keep “them” out (build a wall) or keep them in “their place” (in subservient positions), “we” can regain our pride and, for men, their masculinity. Fear leads, then, to aggressive “othering” strategies rather than to useful analysis.

We can, as Martha Nussbaum (2010) suggests, benefit from the enlarged and varied imagination that literature, films, and other cultural products afford us to start to occupy different positionings than we usually occupy.

The fact that a good and virtuous decision is context-sensitive does not imply that it is right only relative to, or inside, a limited context, any more than the fact that a good navigational judgement is sensitive to particular weather conditions shows that it is correct only in a local or relational sense. It is right absolutely, objectively, anywhere in the human world, to attend to the particular features of one's context; and the person who so attends and who chooses accordingly is making, according to Aris­totle, the humanly correct decision, period.

Renowned philosopher and Chicago University professor Martha C. Nussbaum told me in an interview after Modi’s 2012 victory, his third as Gujarat chief minister, that his triumph was a blot on the people of Gujarat who chose to “re-elect an outlaw”.

But it is to the school that Tagore devotes central emphasis in The Religion of Man.14 He begins by expressing his lifelong dissatisfaction with the schools he attended: “The inexpensive power to be happy, which, along with other children, I brought to this world, was being constantly worn away by friction with the brick-and-mortar arrangement of life, by monotonously mechanical habits and the customary code of respectability” (144). In effect, children begin as madcap Bauls, full of love, longing, and joy in the presence of nature. Their love of play and their questioning spirit need to be strengthened, not crushed. But schools usually crush all that is disorderly,

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she dissects the darker history of positive thinking, the cult of optimism that has, in recent decades, she writes, metastasized into “an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy

Will you be encountering each other for the first time through this communication, or do you have an established relationship? Do they already trust you as an expert, or do you need to work to establish credibility? These are important considerations when it comes to determining how to structure your communication and whether and when to use data, and may impact the order and flow of the overall story you aim to tell.

Eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith, an early opponent of both colonial conquest and the slave trade, observed that it is difficult for people to sustain concern for people at a distance, when fear can so easily call the mind back to the self. His example is an earthquake in China. Hearing of the disaster, a humane person in Europe will be extremely upset and concerned—for a while. But if that same person hears that he (Smith typically imagines males) will lose his little finger the following day, he will completely forget the fate of millions of people: “the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.

When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you.

I'm its creature, the way we are all creatures of the art we care about, even if decide to throw it in a garbage can.

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

You know you’ve achieved perfection, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing to take away

Not For Profit focuses on citizenship. I argue that the humanities and arts provide skills that are essential to keep democracy healthy.

la educación debería proporcionarnos los elementos necesarios para desenvolvernos de manera eficaz en ese diálogo multinacional, como “ciudadanos del mundo

Using a table in a live presentation is rarely a good idea. As your audience reads it, you lose their ears and attention to make your point verbally. When

American consumers take pride in their media savvy; they are too hip to be fooled, too jaded to be appalled.

You should always want your audience to know or do something. If you can't concisely articulate that, you should revisit whether you need to communicate in the first place.

These days, we are all performing what a friend of mine once called “the audit,” struggling to reconcile the stories we used to tell ourselves with the ones we tell ourselves now.

a moral lasagna of questionable aesthetic choices

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

Panicked, Mary stares into the camera, then holds up her hand, making a wiping motion and droning “Erase! Erase!” It’s the primal scene of reality TV stardom, rendered as bleak comedy.

Der Nussbaum lächelte. Elayne kniff die Augen zusammen und versuchte, genauer hinzusehen. Doch, sie war sich sicher: Er lächelte. Natürlich hatte er keinen Mund, keine Lippen, die sich wie die Sichel eines Halbmondes nach oben biegen konnten. Auch waren da keine Wangen, die sich zu kleinen Äpfeln formten, und keine Augen. Der Baum hatte kein Gesicht. Kein menschenliches zumindest.

When I see Peter at the bus the next morning, he’s standing around with all this lacrosse friends, and at first I feel shy and nervous, but then he sees me, and his face breaks into a grin. “C’mere, Covey,” he says, so I go to him and he throws my tote over his shoulder. In my ear he says, “You’re sitting with me, right?” I nod. As we make our way onto the bus, somebody wolf whistles. It seems like people are staring at us, and at first I think it’s just my imagination, but then I see Genevieve look right at me and whisper to Emily Nussbaum. It sends a chill down my spine. “Genevieve keeps staring at me,” I whisper to Peter. “It’s because you’re so adorably quirky,” he says, and he rests his hands on my shoulders and gives me a kiss on the cheek, and I forget all about Genevieve.

Disgust soon begins to do real damage, however, in connection with the basic narcissism of human children. One effective way to distance oneself thoroughly from one’s own animality is to project the properties of animality—bad smell, ooziness, sliminess—onto some group of people, and then to treat those people as contaminating or defiling, turning them into an underclass, and, in effect, a boundary, or a buffer zone, between the anxious person and the feared and stigmatized properties of animality.

And what is “the West”? It is not a geographical entity, since it includes Australia and Poland and excludes nations such as Egypt and Morocco that are further west than some of the included nations. And, as Beinart notes, it is not a political or economic term either, since Japan, South Korea, and India are not included. Basically, it is an appeal to shared religion and shared racial identity: to Christianity (with some Jews included) and to whiteness (since Latin America does not appear to be included).

Critical thinking builds corporate cultures of accountability in which critical voices are not silenced. And a trained imagination is essential for innovation, a key to any healthy economy: no nation can thrive on the basis of yesterday’s skills learned by rote.

When we meet in society, if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.

What makes majorities try, so ubiquitously, to denigrate or stigmatize minorities? Whatever these forces are, it is ultimately against them that true education for responsible national and global citizenship must fight. And it must fight using whatever resources the human personality contains that help democracy prevail against hierarchy.

The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything. At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show: “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.” Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd. “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic. Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.

Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.

What about the arts and literature, so often valued by democratic educators? An education for economic growth will, first of all, have contempt for these parts of a child’s training, because they don’t look like they lead to personal or national economic advancement. For this reason, all over the world, programs in arts and the humanities, at all levels, are being cut away, in favor of the cultivation of the technical.

the Jim Crow South, often the plates off which black people had eaten were broken so that they could not be used again. Baseball great Hank Aaron describes this common practice in his autobiography, noting, “If dogs had eaten off those plates, they’d have washed them.”21 So the US South had convoluted and bizarre practices regarding food: blacks could cook and serve food for whites, but they were thought to contaminate the plates they themselves used.

As the medium changed and more “auteurist” shows got green-lighted, and as “showrunner” became a term of art, turning television writers into celebrities with their own fan bases, shows that could be traced to one clear creator often got more credit from critics—a bias that tended, among other things, to favor drama over comedy. To quote BoJack Horseman: “Diane, the whole point of television is it’s a collaborative medium where one person gets all the credit.

From the 1960s on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh realpolitik, one based on her experience: Looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money - and from men as the route to money - you were dead in the water. Women were one another's competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn't cross over.

Tragedy happens only when you are trying to live well, because for a heedless person who doesn’t have deep commitments to others, conflit isn't a tragedy. Now the lesson certainly is not to try to maximize conflict or to romanticize struggle and suffering, but it’s rather that you should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. But you want people to live their lives with a deep seriousness of commitment: not to adjust their desires to the way the world actually goes, but rather to try to wrest from the world the good life that they desire. And sometimes that does lead them into tragedy.

A central part of disgust’s pathology, we said, is the bifurcation of the world into the “pure” and the “impure”—the construction of a “we” who are without flaw and a “they” who are dirty, evil, and contaminating. Much bad thinking about international politics shows the traces of this pathology, as people prove all too ready to think about some group of others as black and sullied, while they themselves are on the side of the angels. We now notice that this very deep-seated human tendency is nourished by many time-honored modes of storytelling to children, which suggest that the world will be set right when some ugly and disgusting witch or monster is killed, or even cooked in her own oven.

The ability to think well about political issues affecting the nation, to examine, reflect, argue, and debate, deferring to neither tradition nor authority •  The ability to recognize fellow citizens as people with equal rights, even though they may be different in race, religion, gender, and sexuality: to look at them with respect, as ends, not just as tools to be manipulated for one’s own profit •  The ability to have concern for the lives of others, to grasp what policies of many types mean for the opportunities and experiences of one’s fellow citizens, of many types, and for people outside one’s own nation •  The ability to imagine well a variety of complex issues affecting the story of a human life as it unfolds: to think about childhood, adolescence, family relationships, illness, death, and much more in a way informed by an understanding of a wide range of human stories, not just by aggregate data •  The ability to judge political leaders critically, but with an informed and realistic sense of the possibilities available to them •  The ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of one’s own local group •  The ability to see one’s own nation, in turn, as a part of a complicated world order in which issues of many kinds require intelligent transnational deliberation for their resolution This is only a sketch, but it is at least a beginning in articulating what we need.

I was hardly a major sex radical in my personal life, but I nonetheless thought of myself as a member of the “pro-sex” resistance, even if no one in that resistance knew I existed.

Further develop the situation or problem by covering relevant background. Incorporate external context or comparison points. Give examples that illustrate the issue. Include data that demonstrates the problem. Articulate what will happen if no action is taken or no change is made. Discuss potential options for addressing the problem. Illustrate the benefits of your recommended solution.

recommend anything other than a white background.

In my experience, however, the best way to learn a tool is to use it. When you can’t figure out how to do something, don’t give up. Continue to play with the program and search Google for solutions. Any frustration you encounter will be worth it when you can bend your tool to your will!

Незабаром всі країни світу почнуть виготовляти покоління корисних машин, а не повноцінних громадян, що здатні самостійно мислити, критикувати традиційний уклад та розуміти значення страждань і досягнень інших людей.

Перерахую здібності, що пов'язані з гуманітарними науками та мистецтвом: здатність до критичного мислення; здатність відірватися від приватних інтересів і поглянути на світові проблеми з точки зору "громадянина світу"; і, нарешті, здатність співчутливо ставитися до труднощів іншої людини.

La investigación es, o debe ser, una ciencia exacta y debería recibir un tratamiento igual de frío y objetivo. Tú has intentado revestirlo de romanticismo, lo cual tiene prácticamente el mismo resultado que si hubieras urdido una historia de amor o hubieras acudido al quinto axioma de Euclides.

Yo soy uno que, cuando Amor me inspira, toma nota. Y del mismo modo que dentro me dicta, así me voy expresando”.]

Thinking falsely that our own society is pure within can only breed aggression toward outsiders and blindness about aggression toward insiders.

Such myths of purity, however, are misleading and pernicious.

the political struggle for freedom and equality must first of all be a struggle within each person, as compassion and respect contend against fear, greed, and narcissistic aggression.

Meanwhile, children learn from the adult societies around them, which typically direct this “projective disgust” onto one or more concrete subordinate groups—African Americans, Jews, women, homosexuals, poor people, lower castes in the Indian caste hierarchy.

If you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve only done so on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone

They next questioned him about his sandbagging on aerosol pentamidine. According to Nussbaum, “. . . dozens of community doctors and thousands of PWAs [people with AIDS] already knew: that Aerosol Pentamidine prevented AIDS’ most lethal symptom—pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP).

It’s always the same, that someone was a small kid in Nowheresville, they were gay, they were hiding it, and then they saw Lance and realized they weren’t alone,” Susan told me. Lance recognized his celebrity as a vocation, which meant that he alone among the Louds accepted the Raymonds’ role,

pack in its acute focus on female suffering, offering up a unique blend of abjection and Vegas glitz, like The Bachelor crossed with GoFundMe.

While Dragnet wasn’t a reality show, it played one on TV,

If the ’70s had given off the funk of a stained shag carpet after a basement orgy, the ’80s were more like a plastic slipcovered sofa in the living room, ready for company.

(Reading) promotes an accurate awareness of our common vulnerability. It is true that human beings are needy, incomplete creatures who are in many ways dependent on circumstances beyond their control for the possibility of well-being

Days in the sun, such harmless fun, they remind my heart of you. But you crumbled away, now alone I will play, my heart crumbled away with you too. Bundles of flowers, a bouquet towers, they remind my heart of you. But your soul flew away, how I wish it could stay, my heart flew away with you too. Rows of stones, such beautiful bones, they remind my heart of you. But you rotted away, at the end of the day, my heart rots away for you too.

He and the real estate mogul Donald Trump were supposed to develop a show based on the board game Monopoly, a project that was a model of corporate synergy, uniting three brands—a high-end documentarian, a fake tycoon, and a game that celebrated capitalism.

The Bachelor was a more immersive experience, like being trapped inside an erotic terrarium, lulled by floating rose petals. In a world of tacky, The Bachelor was a fancy show.

Langley’s next anti-drug project, the 1985 music video “Stop the Madness”—which you must google immediately—was a for-hire project produced by actor Tim Reid, a member of the Entertainment Industries Council for a Drug-Free Society.

one version, gay male creativity is a superpower, healing the world and building bridges. In the other, it’s realpolitik, an awareness of how to “trade up.

Who you sympathized with came down to which kind of behavior you found more unstable: the notion of marrying a stranger to get a free week in Vegas or the idea of seeking your soulmate on a Fox game show.

Jon Kroll, a game show buff who had been raised in a hippie commune, amid what he described as “naked acid parties, hot tubs, and madness”—a perfect résumé for the job.

Striking confirmation of Rubenstein’s argument comes from the fact that Singapore and China, two nations that, to say the least, do not aim at the cultivation of critical and independent democratic citizenship, have recently conducted education reforms that foreground the arts and humanities, explicitly in order to encourage innovation and solid corporate cultures. Of course they then must contain those disciplines, preventing them from spilling over into a demand for open political debate, and this they aggressively do.

The battle for responsible democracy and alert citizenship is always difficult and uncertain. But it is both urgent and winnable, and the humanities are a large part of winning it.

To think about education for democratic citizenship, we have to think about what democratic nations are, and what they strive for.