Martha Nussbaum - The Fragility of Goodness

Victims and Agents What Greek tragedy can teach us about sympathy and responsibility. Martha C. Nussbaum “We are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate.“ “Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.“ — Alain de Botton “Be curious, not judgmental.“ -Walt Whitman “I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in the changing of the Muses; I have been versed in the reasonings of men; but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.“ Euripides, Alcestis, 438 B.C. “It is the tragedian’s task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right—or rather the most horribly wrong—conditions.“ Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety) “If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.“ Elbert Hubbard “The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.“ — Walt Whitman “When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.“ Euripides “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.“ Einstein It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer. AESCHYLUS, Prometheus Bound “On me the tempest falls. It does not make me tremble. O holy Mother Earth, O air and sun, behold me. I am wronged.“ “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.“ — Stephen Jay Gould