As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

I think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

I hate to see the way journalism is devalued: We have to feed the machine; we have to feed the Trump outrage machine, to feed the anger against Trump, to feed the New York liberal anger.

Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More, more--give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you're on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that--and I pity you if it does--you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You'd have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that's what real love feels like--choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That's why the second most abused word is "forever".

Marriage like money is still with us and like money progressively devalued.

Unfortunately the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.