Education does not take place only in schools. Most of the traits…need to be nurtured in the family as well, both in the early years and as the child matures. Part of a comprehensive public policy approach…must include discussion of how families can be supported in the task of developing children’s capabilities. The surrounding peer culture and the larger culture of social norms and political institutions also play a role in supporting or subverting the work done by institutions and families.

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit. (ISBN: 9780691140643) p.8-9

People find it comforting to see themselves as engaged in a titanic “clash of civilizations” in which good democratic nations are pitted against allegedly bad religions and cultures from other parts of the world.…

Such myths of purity, however, are misleading and pernicious. No society is pure, and the “clash of civilizations” is internal to every society. Every society contains within itself people who are prepared to live with others on terms of mutual respect and reciprocity, and people who seek the comfort of domination. We need to understand how to produce more citizens of the former sort and fewer of the latter. Thinking falsely that our own society is pure within can only breed aggression toward outsiders and blindness about aggression toward insiders.

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit. (ISBN: 9780691140643) p.28-29

To some degree all cultures portray manliness as involving control…

[T]he attempt to be that ideal man involves a pretense of control in a world that one does not really control. This pretense is unmasked virtually every day by life itself, as the young “real man” feels hunger, fatigue, longing, often illness or fear. So an undercurrent of shame runs through the psyche of any person who lives by this myth; I am supposed to be a “real man,” but I feel that I do not control my own surroundings, or even my own body in countless ways.

Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit. (ISBN: 9780691140643) p.39

[P]eople who lead the unexamined life…often treat one another disrespectfully. When people think that political debate is something like an athletic contest, where the aim is to score points for their own side, they are likely to see the “other side“ as the enemy and to wish its defeat, or even humiliation. It would not occur to them to seek compromise or to find common ground, any more than in a hockey match the Chicago Blackhawks would seek “common ground“ with their adversaries.

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit. (ISBN: 9780691140643) p.51

The global economy has tied all of us to distant lives. Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standard of people in distant nations who are involved in the production of products we use. Our daily lives put pressure on the global environment. It is irresponsible to bury our head in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people. Education, then, should equip us all to function effectively in such discussions, seeing ourselves as “citizens of the world,” to use a time-honored phrase, rather than merely as Americans, or Indians, or Europeans.

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit. (ISBN: 9780691140643) p.80

Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. They also are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, selfishness, narrowness of the spirit. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture.

If the real clash of civilizations is…a clash within the individual soul, as greed and narcissism content against respect and love, all modern societies are rapidly losing the battle, as they feed the forces that lead to violence and dehumanization and fail to feed the forces that lead to cultures of equality and respect.

Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit. (ISBN: 9780691140643) p.142-143