Relative Value Quotes

• The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

  William Ralph Inge

  Wise, Men, Knows

  William Ralph Inge (1927). “The church in the world: collected essays”, Ayer Co Pub

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• Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

  George Santayana

  May, Common, Language

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.281, 谷月社

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• For us in England, the relative value of the pound against the dollar, that has a huge impact on how easy it is to get our films made in the U.K.

  Eric Fellner

  Impact, Dollars, England

  Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. December 27, 2012.

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• In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.

  James Van Allen

  Motivation, Adventure, Commitment

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• Money is not a part of the visible sector of the economy; people do not consume money. Money is not a physical factor of production, but rather a yardstick for measuring economic input, economic outtake and the relative values of the real goods and services of the economic world. Money provides a method of measuring obligations, rights, powers and privileges. It provides a means whereby certain individuals can accumulate claims against others, or against the economy as a whole, or against many economies.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Real, Mean, Rights

  Louis O. Kelso, Patricia Hetter Kelso (1967). “Two-factor Theory: the Economics of Reality; how to Turn Eighty Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, and Other Proposals”, New York : Vintage Books

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• A Jesuit once wrote a note to Father Arrupe, his superior general, asking him about the relative value of communism, socialism and capitalism. Father Arrupe gave him a lovely reply. He said, "A system is about as good or as bad as the people who use it." People with golden hearts would make capitalism or communism or socialism work beautifully.

  Anthony de Mello

  Father, Heart, People

  Anthony De Mello (2011). “Awareness: Conversations with the Masters”, p.151, Image

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• A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.

  Karl Marx

  Greatness, Substance, Commodity

  Karl Marx (1913). “Value, Price and Profit”

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• Both light and dark are eternity. Human beings assign relative values to colors, but beyond the relative, there just is - what in Zen we call "suchness".

  Frederick Lenz

  Dark, Light, Color

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• Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion
  of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is
  in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Country, Simple, Men

  "'L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution' ('The Old Regime and the Revolution')". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Gerald Bevan. Author's Foreword, 2008.

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• Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Confusion, Political, Democracy

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• Its [the anthropological method] power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.

  Franz Boas

  Teaching, Other Cultures, Civilization

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• Scores do not reveal the most important facts about a wine. The written commentary (tasting notes) that accompanies the ratings is a better source of information than any score regarding the wine's style and personality, its quality level relative to its peers, and its relative value and aging potential.

  Robert M. Parker, Jr.

  Wine, Personality, Style

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• Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  Country, Holiday, Mean

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• Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.

  Robert Henri

  Art, Order, Law

  Robert Henri (1960). “The art spirit”, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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• It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood.

  Hu Shih

  Elements, Contact, Understood

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• People are, by and large, quite poor at judging correct absolute values but are astute about determining relative values. Psychologists call this coherent arbitrariness, which suggests that individuals are coherent when they compare prices on a relative basis but arbitrary when those prices are considered versus fundamental value.

  Michael Mauboussin

  Judging, People, Arbitrary

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