Quotes About Comparison

Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.

In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.

Indeed, even if the permanent secretary was fat, hypertensive or a smoker, he was still less likely to suffer a heart attack at a given age than a thin, non-smoking, low-blood-pressure janitor.

Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services.

One survey shows that throughout the world and throughout history, from thirteenth-century England to modern Canada, from Kenya to Mexico, men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.

Topologically, a P and a q are equivalent, as are a coffee mug and a doughnut.

Illustration is to cartooning as prison sodomy is to pansexual orgy.

I've been thinking about your Father a lot lately, and I've realized something. I married Gary specifically for the fact that he wasn't Curtis. If your Father has an opposite, it's Gary. I just need to decide if I want to spend the rest of my life with someone I married by default.

Why would some decent guy our age wanna talk to me? He can go on his phone and find a hundred versions of me the way I looked fifteen years ago.

It's a cruel fact that if your wife cheats on you, the guy will have a name like Tyler. Something cool—something your parents never would have had the guts to name you. The

Hamish shrugged. "It's all pretty cool and impressive … if you never saw fucking Jurassic Park .

Convincing someone to believe something that was inherently unbelievable often meant getting that person to make a quick and easy comparison to something they already knew.

Confronted with each nation's own questionable products and practices, we have two choices. We can say, as Mr. Komatsu hopes, Well they do X but we do Y, so who are we to judge? We then end up with no standard at all, instead using other people's cruelties as an excuse for our own.

by 1929, one out of every five Americans had a car (as opposed to one out of thirty-seven Englishmen, one out of forty Frenchmen, and one out of forty-eight Germans).

Top Trumps appeared to be a game in which you got cards, and the cards had a picture (in this case, of a horse), and told you all kinds of stats for that horse, how fast it was, how big it was, etc. Whoever had the better horse won both the cards. You repeated this until someone had all the cards. So, basically it was exactly like high school, except it only took three minutes. Which was really a bit more humane, if you thought about it.

She wasn't as bad as Todd, as good as Sabrina, or the well-meaning drug dealer who almost made it to safety. She was simply there, the girlfriend, the fourth victim.

Why was her life over when she was only seventeen? She'd peaked. It was done.

This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them.

Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family for a paint job on their house--it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.

Temes al hombre que tiene un dólar menos que tú, porque ese dólar es suyo por derecho y él te hace sentir como un estafador moral. Odias al hombre que tiene un dólar más que tú, porque ese dólar es tuyo por derecho y te hace sentir moralmente estafado. El hombre que está por debajo es la fuente de tu culpa; el hombre que está por arriba es la fuente de tu frustración.