Philosophy
Dobbs is often used as a foil for Howard's philosophical comments on the value of gold and one's responsibilities to one's companions. For example, the Marxist exchange in the Oso Negro flophouse:
Howard: Say, answer me this one, will you? Why is gold worth some twenty bucks an ounce?
Dobbs: I don't know. Because it's scarce.
Howard: A thousand men, say, go searchin' for gold. After six months, one of them's lucky: one out of a thousand. His find represents not only his own labor, but that of nine hundred and ninety-nine others to boot. That's six thousand months, five hundred years, scramblin' over a mountain, goin' hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin' and the gettin' of it.
Dobbs: I never thought of it just like that.
Howard: Well, there's no other explanation, mister. Gold itself ain't good for nothing except making jewelry with and gold teeth.
Read more about this topic: The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (film)
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“Of your philosophy you make no use
If you give place to accidental evils.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)