Quantification, like surgery, is an excellent thing in the right place, but a very bad topic for obsession. Unless you know just what you are counting--unless you are sure that the things counted are standard units--and unless you understand what is proved by results of your counting, quantifying provide you only with the outward show of science, a mirage, never the oasis.
Mary MidgleyRelated topics
bad counting mirage oasis obsession outward place quantification right science show standard sure surgery thing topic thingsRelated quotes
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these dreams die, but others nourish and protect them nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who hope that their dreams will come true.
Woodrow Wilson
We were created for eternal life by our Creator, we are called to it by the word of God, and we are renewed by holy Baptism. And Christ the Son of God came into the world for this, that He should call us and take us there, and He is the one thing needful. For this reason your very first endeavor and care should be to receive it. Without it everything is as nothing, though you have the whole world under you.
Tikhon of Zadonsk
If the kings and rulers of the nations knew the love of God they would never make war. War comes to us for our sins, not because of our love. The Lord created us in His love, and bade us live in love and glorify Him... If we understood the force of Christ's words, ‘Learn humility and meekness of me', the whole world, the whole universe would abandon all other knowledge to study this heavenly science...
Silouan the Athonite
In a musical sense, it seemed like all the good intentions had gone awry, very quickly. I mean, we got back from America and Blur had made The Great Escape, which I thought was a really, truly awful album - so cheesy, like a parody of Parklife, but without the balls or the intellect. And Oasis were enormous and I always found them incredibly dreary. There was this uncritical reverence surrounding the whole thing.
Justine Frischmann
More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.
Ronald Fisher
