Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible, rather than abused to control people from the outside and above — that is, to dominate them.

, the science of measurement, is part of the essential but largely hidden infrastructure of the modern world. We need it for high-technology manufacturing, human health and safety, the protection of the environment, global climate studies and the basic science that underpins all these. Highly accurate measurements are not exclusively the preserve of the and engineering; many areas of chemistry, and medicine are now dependent on accurate quantitative measurements. in all manufactured and agricultural products is strictly controlled by regulations that need accurate metrology for their implementation.

Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible rather than abused to control people from the outside and above — that is, to dominate them. It is the common violation of this principle that largely explains why measurement is the weakest area in the work of the manager today. As long as measurements are abused as a tool of control (for instance, as when measurements are used, as a weapon of an internal secret police that supplies audits and critical appraisals of a manager’s performance to the boss without even sending a carbon copy to the manager himself) measuring will remain the weakest area in the manager’s performance.2

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.

To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. ... The reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life.

Mathematics is so useful because physical scientists and engineers have the good sense to largely ignore the "religious" fanaticism of professional mathematicians, and their insistence on so-called rigor, that in many cases is misplaced and hypocritical, since it is based on "axioms" that are completely fictional, i.e. those that involve the so-called infinity.

Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.

Those skilled in mathematical analysis know that its object is not simply to calculate numbers, but that it is also employed to find the relations between magnitudes which cannot be expressed in numbers and between functions whose law is not capable of algebraic expression.

[F]inding direct measurement so often impossible, we are compelled to devise means of doing it indirectly. Hence arose Mathematics.

Mathematics is a versatile art; it can be applied to widely different purposes. Math has no morality; it does not care what it counts or what it proves.

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.