Relative Quotes

“The variable that marks some periods as barren and some as rich in prophetic vision is in the interest, the level of seeking, the responsiveness of the hearers. The variable is not in the presence or absence or the relative quality and force of the prophetic voices. The prophet grows in stature as people respond to his message ... It is the seekers, then, who make the prophet.”

— Robert K. Greenleaf

“Aikido practice is a method of incorporating the fundamentals of Great Harmony, Great Love, and Gratitude into one's own heart. To integrate these fundamentals into Aikido technique, I have to eliminate the sense of winning and losing. The feeling of completion must be completely transmuted into the heart of gratitude and harmony. If I am able to do that, I will transcend issues of relative strength or skill.”

— Linda Holiday

“The odor of burning sulphur shifted on the night air, acrid, a little foul. Somewhere, the Canaan dwellers had learned of a supplier of castor - an extract from the beaver's perineal glands. Little packets containing the brown-orange mass of dried animal matter arrived from Detroit at the Post Office's "general delivery." At home, by the kerosene light, the recipients unwrapped the packets. A poor relative sometimes would be given some of the fibrous gland, bitter and smelling slightly like strong human sweat, and the rest would go into a Mason jar. Each night, as prescribed by old Burrifous through his oracle, Ronnie, a litt1e would be mixed with clear spring water. And as it gave the water a creamy, rusty look, the owner would sigh with awe and fear. The creature, wolf or man, became more real through the very specific which was to vanquish him.”

— Leslie H. Whitten Jr.

“What's right is relative, isn't it?”

— Marie Lu

“My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.”

— Octavia E. Butler

“All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

“She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.”

— Helen Simonson

“For us in England, the relative value of the pound against the dollar, that has a huge impact on how easy it is to get our films made in the U.K.”

— Eric Fellner

“It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.”

— Friedrich August Von Hayek

“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.”

— T.S. Eliot

“Suprisingly, one of the most complex pieces of code is the code to determine where a note is in the staff. Finale stores notes as relative scale positions in the current key.”

— Robert Patterson

“Arts without a spiritual relative is like frying buns with water.”

— Michael Bassey Johnson

“We pay some price when necessary to bring down inflation but that price is temporary and is not large relative to the permanent gain from reduced inflation.”

— Martin Feldstein

“Money can't buy happiness, but it allows one to endured unhappiness in relative comfort.”

— Stephen King

“The reality is that the workforce relative to the number of people retired has shrunk and today in America there are only 3.3 working Americans paying payroll taxes to support each individual currently retired and collecting Social Security taxes.”

— John Shadegg

“Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates' relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive - and human knowledge would suffer terribly.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

“Which makes Archer and Nick-"
"Cousins," Archer filled in, still stirring his soup. "Nearly murdered by my own relative. That has to win some kind of medal for dysfunction." Then his expression darkened. "Or maybe it's just family tradition.”

— Rachel Hawkins

“Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.”

— Flannery O'Connor

“Three of the most important factors in determining to what degree a government's power will be controlled or uncontrolled therefore are: (1) the relative desire of the populace to impose limits on the government's power; (2) the relative strength of the subjects' independent organizations and institutions to withdraw collectively the sources of power; and (3) the population's relative ability to withhold their consent and assistance.”

— Anonymous.

“It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“When you're your parents' one shot at a genetic legacy, you may get to attend all the best schools, wear all the best clothes and eat all the best foods - at least relative to children in multiple-sibling households. But you also wind up with an overweening sense of your own importance.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

“I'd say the main way people get into terrible financial trouble is just to spend too much money relative to their income, and that is an endemic problem in the United States of America, and that's the kind of thing that should be taught about in schools.”

— Ben Stein

“The bottom line is that the position of the Sun relative to the stars slowly changes for any given date, and over the course of 26,000 years, it can easily slide between constellations. So you may think you're a Pisces, but you're actually an Aquarius.”

— Seth Shostak

“The Baudelaires looked at one another with bitter smiles. Sunny was right. It wasn't fair that their parents had been taken away from them. It wasn't fair that the evil and revolting Count Olaf was pursuing them wherever they went, caring for nothing but their fortune. It wasn't fair that they moved from relative to relative, with terrible things happening at each of their new homes, as if the Baudelaires were riding on some horrible bus that stopped only at stations of unfaireness and misery.”

— Lemony Snicket

“There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night. The point is that the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on.”

— Stephen Hawking

“If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.”

— Dick Cavett

“In relative youth, we assume we'll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.”

— Dick Cavett

“I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it.”

— Donald Hall

“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation
these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events
a job, a mate, a child
through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”

— Lillian B. Rubin

“Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming."”

— J. C. R. Licklider

“Discretion, like the hole in a doughnut, does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restriction. It is therefore a relative concept. It always makes sense to ask, "Discretion under which standards?" or "Discretion as to which authority?”

— Ronald Dworkin

“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals ... It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale.”

— Mary Blakely

“What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity.”

— Stephen A. Diamond

“It seems that nearly every American either has a share of federal spending or has a close relative who does.”

— Trent Lott

“Every year is different and every team is different. Your talent is different, how it gets is different, your leadership is different. That's one of the things that I really enjoy about it [coaching] - trying to maximize the potential of your team relative to how it changes every year.”

— Pete Lembo

“A state is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and the autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of the system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate connection with the whole.”

— Julius Evola

“Therefore the solid body of the earth is reasonably considered as being the largest relative to those moving against it and as remaining unmoved in any direction by the force of the very small weights, and as it were absorbing their fall. And if it had some one common movement, the same as that of the other weights, it would clearly leave them all behind because of its much greater magnitude. And the animals and other weights would be left hanging in the air, and the earth would very quickly fallout of the heavens. Merely to conceive such things makes them appear ridiculous.”

— Ptolemy

“I don't think I'll ever meet the perfect woman. I might have to get me one of them mail order women. You can do that: you send away to the Philippines, and they send you a wife. The only thing is, once you're on their mailing list, they keep sending you a relative a month whether you want it or not.”

— Adam Ferrara

“People who are rich want to be richer, but what's the difference? The toys get different, that's all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It's all relative.”

— Martina Navratilova

“Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

“Poverty is relative, and, therefor not ignoble.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

“Individual price and wage changes will not be prevented. In the main, price changes will simply be concealed by taking the form of changes in discounts, service, and quality, and wage changes, in overtime, perquisites and so on ... . But to whatever extent the freeze is enforced, it will do harm by distorting relative prices.”

— Milton Friedman

“Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives.”

— Stephen Hawking

“Last I checked, Bill Gates was worth $50 billion. If the average employed adult, who is walking in a hurry, will pick up a quarter from the sidewalk, but not a dime, then the corresponding amount of money given their relative wealth that Bill Gates would ignore if he saw it lying on the street is $25,000.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Each one of us is an individual, just like talk show hosts are different from one another, and newspaper columnists are different from each other. So, former presidents are different from each other, too. Some have gone into relative seclusion. Some have decided to teach.”

— Jimmy Carter

“We may produce at will, from a sending station. an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed.”

— Nikola Tesla

“I think we're going to have to do better. Mr. Nixon talks about our being the strongest country in the world. I think we are today, but we were far stronger relative to the Communists 5 years ago. And what is of great concern is that the balance of power is in danger of moving with them. They made a breakthrough in missiles and by 1961, '2, and '3, they will be outnumbering us in missiles.”

— John F. Kennedy

“Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality ... The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals.”

— Virginia Satir

“As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.”

— Richard Rorty