"A cynic, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of something or an action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live, or to describe the significance of different actions. Value systems are proscriptive and prescriptive beliefs; they affect the ethical behavior of a person or are the basis of their intentional activities. Often prima
"Everything excellent limits us momentarily because we feel unable to match up to it; only insofar as we subsequently accept it into our own culture, absorb it as belonging to our own mental and temperamental powers, do we come to love and value it."
"The politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desired wealth or an unequal share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests. For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical."
"Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover."
"Even though moral values are not simply “chosen” but rather “discovered”, it is central to the democratic objectivist position that the free individual acceptance or recognition of value is an essential and not an accidental requirement in valuing its moral standing. The use of force always requires a particular justification. Moral truth is not a sufficient condition of this and even not a necessary condition. A democratic objectivist is not insensitive to Devlins conventionalist argument about “social disintegration”. But while convnentionalists argue against moral pluralism because they consider it to be a sign of such disintegration taking place, from the pluralist point of view, enforcing one particular morality is, on the contrary, seen as a disintegrating social force, which would lead to upheavals, civil war, repression and discrimination."
"Both the court and the general public give a conventional value to men and things, and then are surprised to find themselves deceived by it. This is as if arithmeticians should give a variable an arbitrary value to the figures in a sum, and then, after restoring their true and regular value in the addition, be astonished at the incorrectness of their answer."
"Blessed, plainly, is that life which is not valued at the estimation of outsiders, but is known, as judge of itself, by its own inner feelings. It needs no popular opinion as its reward in any way; nor has it any fear of punishments. Thus the less it strives for glory, the more it rises above it."