Latest Martha C. Nussbaum Quotes from Interviews

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• I think we need government to play a part in having a health policy that makes nursing care available for the increasing numbers who are going to need it.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Nursing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.neh.gov

• We really have to think about aging because women are living longer than men. More of the people who need care are women. A lot of them are living alone, with no one to care for them, or they're shunted into institutions. I would like to see a sensible aging policy more like what the Nordic countries have. They're cutting back those programs, but there you can still have in-home nursing care. You don't have to rely on your children. I personally don't want to be a burden on my daughter.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Country, Daughter, Children

  Source: www.neh.gov

• We have to change men's expectations, as they grow up, regarding their share of domestic work, of child care, but also of elder care, which is less pleasant and which men don't want to do.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Children, Growing Up, Men

  Source: www.neh.gov

• There's a gap in perceptions between women and men. Women feel much freer than they did, but still, when alcohol is involved, especially, there's a lot of sexual assault, and a lot of confusion about that. So, we need to focus a lot more on what consent is and on the importance of affirmative consent.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Men, Confusion, Focus

  Source: www.neh.gov

• After all, the nation is not just an entity. It's a story. It's a story of what's salient, what brought us together, what we are willing to live and die for.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Together, Stories, Entity

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I think the obstacle for women is that their lives are intertwined with the lives of men. Change at the very deepest level of one's daily life and one's being is required if women are to be really equal.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Men, Thinking, Levels

  Source: www.neh.gov

• The EU might have become a large federal nation. But they would have had to do things differently. Number one, they would've had to make people feel like participants in a common project of autonomous law-giving. Much more political accountability, much more participation. That didn't happen, I think, because the movers and shakers were more concerned with economic union than political union.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Thinking, Numbers, Law

  Source: www.neh.gov

• With the rise of capitalism, it became more obvious that people pursue individual self-interest. The great nationalist in Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini, a wonderful philosopher, said that we need the nation. We need something that people can lean on, from which they can then reach out to the whole world. The idea of all humanity is too vague. It can't motivate human aspiration in a reliable way.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Self, Ideas, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

• People have a deep need to be legislators, and the idea of autonomy has become very precious.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Ideas, People, Needs

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I am a very big fan of the nation, actually. In Cicero's time, there was this idea that although we were members of the whole world of human beings, we also needed to connect our imaginations to a smaller unit. The smaller unit was something we knew we could live or die for, as Cicero died for the Roman republic.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Ideas, Imagination, Fans

  Source: www.neh.gov

• Property rights can improve a woman's ability to stand up to violence in the home. You might think education and employment are important because they give women exit options, but property is as well. Give women equal property rights to inherited land, then they have an asset they can take out of the marriage. This gives husbands strong incentives to not beat them.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Strong, Husband, Home

  Source: www.neh.gov

• Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Philosophy, Firsts, Principles

  Source: www.neh.gov

• If you really do want to increase women's status, you could focus on just that, but you'd probably better focus also on women's education. Access to artificial contraception, I would say, is also a very important determinant of women's status.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Focus, Important, Want

  Source: www.neh.gov

• Choice matters. You might have the opportunity to eat a nutritious diet, though you might choose to eat a lousy diet. What matters is the opportunity.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Opportunity, What Matters, Choices

  Source: www.neh.gov

• People don't just want to feel satisfied. They actually want to act.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  People, Want, Satisfied

  Source: www.neh.gov

• The GDP approach doesn't address many aspects of human life: health, education, political liberty, religious liberty, employment opportunities. And these are not all that well correlated with gross domestic product. We also have to think about equality among groups. And freedom of speech and religion. China always ranks near the top of developing countries these days, but there are lots of things we might see as lacking in China.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Country, Religious, Thinking

  Source: www.neh.gov

• A person in torment is not going to give you anything.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Giving, Torment, Persons

  Source: www.neh.gov

• The thing that I find so bad about anger is the desire for payback. Of course, it is very human to wish for revenge. Your mother has died in the hospital, and the first thought a lot of people have is, I'll sue the doctor. You feel helpless, and you think, I'm less helpless if I'm doing something active that makes someone else pay. And social media make it easy to inflict all kinds of pain on other people. But what good does it do?

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Mother, Pain, Revenge

  Source: www.neh.gov

• TV has a lot of problems, but I think the Internet and social media have a lot more. Under the cover of anonymity people say the most vicious things.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Thinking, Media, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

• Radio was, in a way, a very philosophical medium. You could make an argument on the radio, and people listened to it. Television is already harder because people's attention span becomes shorter with television. Cut to a commercial and all that.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Philosophical, Cutting, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

• There are no general-interest media that all of us can tap into. I'm not a good person to talk to about social media. I just avoid it. I'm suspicious also of the culture of venting. But the bigger question is, How can we in this media world have a genuine civic conversation? I mean, look at Franklin Roosevelt. He had these radio talks that all Americans listened to, and there was a common civic conversation that came out of it.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Mean, Media, World

  Source: www.neh.gov

• You have to pay so much to see theater, even in Chicago. In the Greek theater, you didn't have to pay anything. You actually had to go, and you just sat there all day.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Greek, Chicago, Pay

  Source: www.neh.gov

• It's not as though there aren't many, many art works and many other cultures, but there was something special about the civic nature of the Greek theater. All the citizens stopped working. They came into these theaters. It wasn't like a Broadway theater where you sit in the dark and you expect to be passively entertained. You're in this theater, amphitheater, in bright sunlight looking at your fellow citizens, recognizing their faces, and thinking with them about the future of your city. I think very few cultures have had a theatrical tradition that is quite so civic.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Art, Dark, Thinking

  Source: www.neh.gov

• The Greek tragedies and comedies are like a roadmap to all the ways in which trying to live this rich, full life can go wrong. You could get into a war. You could find that you have members of your family on the wrong side of a political crisis. You could be raped. You could find that your child has gone crazy because of some horrible experience she's had.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Children, Crazy, War

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I think the imagination helps us move out of the purely oppositional mentality and see the world in a richer and more variegated way.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Moving, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: www.neh.gov