Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.
Martha NussbaumRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding another culture is achievable through individual effort, not just by being born into one.
Martha Nussbaum emphasizes that anyone, regardless of their cultural background, can gain a profound understanding of another culture through dedicated study and exploration. She challenges the notion that simply being born into a culture grants inherent understanding, suggesting that it requires intentional effort and engagement to truly comprehend different ways of life.
Themes
UnderstandingCultureEducationKnowledgeEffort
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about cross-cultural communication, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of education in understanding others.
More from Martha Nussbaum
All quotes →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.
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Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.
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Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.
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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.
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Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.
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