Mary Midgley Quote

The future will not "be with" anybody in the sense of falling to them as a conquest. The need for many different methods is not going to go away, dissolved in a quasi-physical heaven where all serious work is quantitative... 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.

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 87-88.