Samuel Johnson Quotes
Round numbers are always false.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Vol. 2, Charles Dilly, 1791, p. 222.
There is a great tendency in politics and government operations to get extremely precise numbers because political opponents will always attack all numbers that do not support their positions. The result is that typically, so much time and money goes into trying to get precision, that by the time the numbers are good enough the opportunity to make the right policy decision will have passed. Much information that bears on an issue is never used because it is not precise enough while the precise information is not particularly relevant. See {619763} for a similar related quote.
A TV journalist in an interview asked the Treasurer, "When did your government lose its grip on reality?"
See {234968} for an earlier, similar view.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
