I'm very passionate about political issues, but I also think that listening to people who disagree is extremely important, and I try to build that into my teaching, sometimes by co-teaching with rightwing colleagues.

I think that it's rational to fear your own death or to fear harm to your family.

Mob rule is always extremely dangerous for the future of democracy.

I wake up at night thinking about Euripides' 'Hecuba.' That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.

My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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.

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.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

I think a lot of people get hope through civic organizations and through their churches.

To be sure Plato did not favor 'affirmative action' to fill political and military offices in his own society; nor did he enroll women in his school.

I worked among many famous philosophers, and I tried to observe how they treated students. I knew which ones I wanted to be like, and which ones I didn't.

Philanthropy can have a very strong selfish component.

I'd like to be a student in Rabindranath Tagore's school in Santiniketan in around 1915, dancing in the dance-dramas he wrote.

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.

I have spent a lot of my career working on normative political philosophy, developing the 'capabilities approach' to social justice. I have also spent a lot of my career working on the structure of the emotions, and their role in human life.

Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.

Fear and monarchy pair nicely. But democracy means you have to work with people you may not like but you must still believe are your equals. And a fearful people never trust the other side.

Every time I undress in the locker room of my gym, I see women bearing the scars of liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants.

Hilary Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89. Those of us who had the good fortune to know Putnam as mentees, colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound gratitude and love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a human being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be themselves, not his acolytes.

My own students say they don't trust anyone who voted for Trump. How can you have a democracy with that?

You have to address anger, fear, and then to think about what the alternatives are: hope, faith, a certain kind of brotherly love. And then you have to set yourself to cultivate those.

I think ageing is challenging, surprising, fun, and full of friendship, so that is the approach I'll take, objecting to the stigmatization of ageing in so many modern societies.

Emotions aren't just mindless urges; they contain thoughts about matters of importance.

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.