Martha Nussbaum Quotes

I'm clearly not a major legal genius.

The rules and principles of case law have never been treated as final truths but as working hypotheses, continually retested in those great laboratories of the law, the courts of justice. Every new case is an experiment, and if the accepted rule which seems applicable yields a result which is felt to be unjust, the rule is reconsidered.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.

I consider myself sort of like a pseudo lawyer. Like, I'm convinced I can solve every case and argue my way.

The declaration that any legal issue is "not an open question in a law school" is a declaration of war upon everything that a law school is. Most fundamentally, a law school is a place of intellectual inquiry, where the acceptability of ideas can only be determined by examining them.

I graduated with a B.A. in philosophy, and it was by far the best major I could have taken in college.

Philosophy is everybody's business.

Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and what you decide is valuable.

Do not make Mistakes about Character. That is the worst and yet easiest error. Better be cheated in the price than in the quality of goods. In dealing with men, more than with other things, it is necessary to look within. To know men is different from knowing things. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.

To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.

If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

No path leads from a knowledge of that which is to that which should be.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.

I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales