“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

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996

“[They use] statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

“Andrew Lang, Scottish humourist” quoted in Scott Reid Lament for a Notion

“the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.”

“Eric Temple Bell, the mathematician” quoted in National Review June 7, 1993

In my latest National Post column I say we seem to have lost sight of what we’re trying to do on the COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially ominous consequences.