“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Not Albert Einstein. As he is a quotation magnet it has stuck to him quite often, but apparently it was actually sociology professor William Bruce Cameron in 1963 (see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-einstein/). Would it be any more clever if it had been Einstein?
In my latest National Post column I lament Forbes’ characteristic attempt to stuff Michael Shellenberger’s brave apology for excessive climate alarmism down the memory hole
“I have said that they were truly happy; and without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute is Benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained.”
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist
Something has been “making you behave as if we were distant acquaintances and you were trying to increase the distance.”
One of the characters in P.G. Wodehouse Do Butlers Burgle Banks?
In my latest National Post column I say when the rule of law no longer applies either to the powerful or to the mob it’s not social justice or any other kind.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we can have a happy Canada Day if we’re sensible about history and human nature.
“Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?… Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers ‘yes.’”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure: It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
Oscar Wilde quoted in Filip Palda The History of Tobacco Regulation: Forward to the Past