The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. ‘I’ve known you were gay for years,’ she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin.
A life lesson for me is, how do you muster the courage to take on a new risk? Whether it’s starting up a business or taking on a new project or expedition. I think the risks that we take are all relative to the risk-taker.
That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America’s minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.
The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.
The United States emerged from the Cold War with unprecedented absolute and relative power. It was truly first among unequals.
An unmarried adult who cannot navigate the welfare system has no choice but to work, but a married working parent is constantly evaluating the relative merits of staying home with the kids versus bringing home that second paycheck.
Home is a relative concept. Home is very much wherever it is that your people are and where you fit in.
People have always said – those words, ‘too conservative,’ is fairly relative. I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
There was never a perception that I was second-class relative to boys. That gave me confidence.
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger.
Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.
It seems everybody has been somehow affected by cancer, either through a relative or a close friend or somewhere, and they know how devastating cancer can be. And they see me, and I refuse to let it affect how I live and what I do.
This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.
They emphasize the viewpoint that the protracted economic stagnation in Japan derives from incomplete economic adjustments to significant changes in relative prices.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
If I care for an elderly relative without payment, it is not work, is not counted in national income, and, as it is not labour, is not counted as work. Should my neighbour pay me to do precisely the same tasks, it would contribute to economic growth.
For example, some stars put out large amounts of energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, so that this can produce a different relative magnitude rating than using light energy from the middle of the spectrum.
Liquidity is a good proxy for relative net worth. You can’t lie about cash, stocks, and bond values.
In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.
I am not so famous. I’m known in a few countries like Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and around the Alps. Some climbers in Beijing know my name, and some in America, but I am not really famous. It’s very relative, my fame.
It is absolutely ludicrous that abortion supporters would accuse a blood relative of Dr. King of hijacking the King legacy. Uncle Martin and my father, Rev. A. D. King were blood brothers. How can I hijack something that belongs to me? I am an heir to the King Family legacy.
I had a couple come in with a negative amortization mortgage on a house that costs way too much relative to their income. They’re consuming real estate, not investing in it.
Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it’s really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books.
Anytime you have a relative in politics, you’re going to catch some flack from people, because that’s just part of the gig.
I can only say this with all relative humility: I saw myself as a Beatle.
One city can look at other cities relative to their city and learn something. It’s a matter of sharing the patterns of what exists in one society based on landscape or cultural values versus other cities.
One notable feature is that English doesn’t have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.
The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
Only recently – about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy – have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that ‘as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’
Dramas about addiction can be exciting to watch. And then dispiriting. Exciting because degradation is fascinating to follow from the relative safety and smugness of an ‘appropriate’ life, and dispiriting because if all that sad mayhem can happen to this or that character, what’s to keep it from happening to me or you?
It’s more dangerous to be a friend or relative of Jackie Chan in the star’s movies than it is to play the third yeoman on a ‘Star Trek’ episode.
The plain Canadian fact is that relative to other Western democracies, the U.S. in particular, there isn’t much difference between our two main political parties.
If you’re a friend or a relative of George Herbert Walker Bush, Prez 41, or George W. Bush, Prez 43, or any other Bushes, then you know an 18-hole round of golf shouldn’t take more than three hours out of your day – there are other important things to do.
I think success is a relative term. If you’re a caveman, success is capturing an elephant. Success is achieving better than the norm. Success is being exceptional. It’s exceptional reputation, exceptional income, and exceptional respect.
Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father’s shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.
My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
‘God’ is a relative word and has a respect to servants, and ‘Deity’ is the dominion of God, not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants.
In this play we’re dealing with relative truths – who’s lying, who’s telling the truth. But underneath that, Ed and I have hit this deeper level of intimacy between old friends that comes out in the play.
In the absence of relative equality – quid pro quo – a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.
The relative lack of power of certain minority groups, and the fear they’re feeling in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, is something I think we really need to take a look at.
Most people do surprisingly poorly when dealing with a relative who is hurting, depressed, or anxious – we get defensive and try to solve the problem rather than finding the truth in what the person is saying.
Everything is relative and you have to learn that sometimes you win and other times you lose.
Blacks in the Caribbean, Britain, Canada and sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the United States have low IQ scores relative to whites.
Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.
As you get older – I’m not old, but 29 is relative in goalie years – you like to see your number of games taper down a little bit so you are fresher for playoffs.
We know that, relative to GPS, radar is not as accurate – we’d be seeing our planes’ precise positions in 3-D, not just approximate locations every eight seconds.
Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?
The current distribution model for movies, in the U.S. particularly, but also around the world, is pretty antiquated relative to the on-demand generation that we’re trying to serve.
I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot.
I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‘among the most unspeakable crimes in history.’ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
