Quotes About Value

It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist - he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth - as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.

I just want to learn as much as I can, and that comes from the people I surround myself with. So whether that is on a one-million-dollar movie, or 100-million-dollar movie, it doesn't really matter.

I'm not a frivolous man, nor am I, in my opinion, a serious man. It's my belief a man has to be a little of both these days. I believe, too, in the value of ahrd work-the harder the better. A man who isn't working has got too much time on his hands, too much time to dwell on himself and his problems.

Leave the gun out of it. I can always hear the sound of money.

The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mailbag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.

We passed a big white two storied Monterey house that must have cost $70,000

Still, few things of worth are ever simple. Or easy.

few things of worth are ever simple. Or easy.' Tomas

people who took things for granted in these situations were called corpses.

The concept of privacy has become too vague and unwieldy a concept to perform useful analytical work. This ambiguity has actually undermined the importance of this value and encumbered its effective protection.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

Keep in mind that any information, teaching, tradition, value, or projection that leads you to dislike or hate yourself is an illusion.

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

My friend Chip Ward speaks of "the tyranny of the quantifiable," of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.

Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.

I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is a more useful overarching term.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.

It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.

It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.

Part of my own endeavor as a writer has been to find ways to value what is elusive and overlooked, to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, and—in John Berger's phrase—to find "another way of telling.

But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one's table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.