"We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"Anything that just costs money is cheap."
— John Steinbeck

"You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself."
— Toni Morrison

"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."
— Albert Einstein

"It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen."
— Aristotle (Etica Nicomaquea & Politica)

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Something that is yours forever is never precious"
— Chaim Potok (My Name Is Asher Lev)

"Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued. "
— Socrates

"Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away."
— Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."
— Any Rand

"Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole."
— B.W. Powe (Towards a Canada of Light)

"Gold is the corpse of value..."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Do not tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value."
— Joe Biden

"It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another."
— Stephen Crane (The Portable Stephen Crane)

"Cultural content has importance to society above and beyond its ability to generate a profit."
— Bjørn Erik Thon

"Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference."
— Robert Coles (The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination)

"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you want to be truly successful invest in yourself to get the knowledge you need to find your unique factor. When you find it and focus on it and persevere your success will blossom."
— Sidney Madwed

"I will place no value on anything I have or may possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. "
— David Livingstone

"Die Dinge haben nur den Wert, den man ihnen verleiht."
— Molière

"The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim"
— Larry Niven (Lucifer's Hammer)

"I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all. And by true I do not mean what is righteous but merely what is so."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"The more you're willing to pay, the more valuable the prize. The question is: Are you willing to pay the price?"
— Johnny Lingo

"The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit."
— Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

"The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made."
— Leah Hager Cohen (Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things)