Quotes About Value

money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political conten­tion.

Only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good.

A legacy of true value is a legacy made of more than money. It's a legacy conceived in wisdom, nurtured by principle, and sustained by character.

Why is it that I always get a whole person when all I want is a pair of hands? -Henry Ford

The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day. — BILL GRAHAM, EVANGELIST DO YOU REMEMBER DOILIES?

Take it from me, the best way to be appreciated somewhere is to not be there, you get me?

I saw for real that he wasn't worth anything without her, and that all his power in life came from her being with him. He turned into half a human in that one instant.

It's human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn't banging loudly on the door.

This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx's supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.

the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.

The difficulty," he says, "lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money" (186): What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities universally express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. (187, emphasis added)

The rise of monetary exchange leads to socially necessary labor-time becoming the guiding force within a capitalistic mode of production. Therefore, value as socially necessary labor-time is historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. It arises only in a situation where market exchange is doing the requisite job.

It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general. (142)

This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism.

You were a laugh with some potential. Now you're but a pricey pain.

What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary

Tis not unreasonable for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master

What is easy and obvious is never valued; and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to the knowledge of it without difficulty, and without any stretch of thought or judgment, is but little regarded.

No existe cualidad de la naturaleza humana que cause errores más fatales en nuestra conducta que la que nos lleva a preferir lo que es presente a lo distante y lo remoto y nos hace desear los objetos más por su situación que por su valor intrínseco.

No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.

The word love has become so devalued, we have to put words in front of it, like 'unconditional'.

Clearly, Siberian reindeer are not fighting over drugged urine for its nutrative value.