In my latest National Post column I deplore Canadian governments’ casual way of denying citizens information even on matters of life and death.
“‘In any look toward 2050, you have the problem of trying to calculate how many babies those who are currently unborn are going to be having. You can’t do that.’”
Nicholas Eberstadt, quoted in “The Population Dud,” The Catholic World Report, May, 2002 according to Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 5 #8 (July/August 2002)
“The measurement of outcomes in higher education is still in the dark ages. There’s still a very strong sense that universities are ultimately measured by the quality of their professoriate and their scholarly output, with relatively less attention paid to the quality of the student experience and the calibre of the learning that goes on. We profile creative and illustrious alumni, and we rub the latest prestigious report or ranking in our hair, but I worry that the actual serious measure of what we’re about is still in its early stages.”
University of Toronto president David Nayor in a Q&A with Kate Fillion in Maclean’s November 13, 2006
“breeding rather than feeding”
John Mercel Robson (my father) summarizing the nature/nurture argument in a letter in 1993
“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