How is the value of life measured? In dollars and cents? Do you measure it's value by the number of battle scars on your knees each time you fell but got up to face the battle once again, or by the number of family members you leave behind when the bright light cradles you through the pearly gates? Is life measurable or immeasurable? In excerpts from radically different view points from the optimistic words of Lance Armstrong to the pessimistic outlook of Hamlet, the tragic account events of 9/11, to the cold calculus of the Human Life Value Calculator" readers are provided with prime individualistic examples on such thought provoking questions as these.

             "To be or not to be, that is the question"!" Hamlet, a lost soul, despises life and contemplates the benefits of suicide yet questions the the happenings of the unknown, such as life after death. In his famous "to be or not to be " soliloquy by William Shakespeare, Hamlet weighs the pros and cons of life and death as he struggles to see the best of life and what it has to offer. Hamlet is no longer able to bare "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to ", after discovering the wrongful death of his father and the unforgiving marriage of hid mother to his father's killer. These unfortunate events have led Hamlet to believe that suicide is the favorable way to end the ceaseless pain and suffering that life has bared upon him. Yet his crucial question "to be or not to be", in other words, to continue living through such tortures of everyday life or to end it by suicide troubles his depressed conscious, for he knows the choice of living means continuously enduring the miserable pains of life. "not to be", to sleep".the thought of suicide is a compelling idea for Hamlet, despite he is unknowing to the unknown ending his life would remove all the pain and suffering he currently endures.