Abstract Value Quotes

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.

I've never seen electricity, that's why I don't pay for it

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.

In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.

To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less groveling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.

The use of money and the use of words are analogous. Money is not always used to buy things which can be pointed to, e.g., when it buys permission to sit in a theatre, or a title, or one's life.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.