Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

The best-supported credit is William Bruce Cameron. Quote Investigator quotes the full two-part maxim in his 1963 Informal Sociology, p. 13, and documents the first half in his Spring 1957 AAUP Bulletin article, p. 34. Wikiquote independently lists the 1963 source under misattributions. QI’s earliest located Einstein connection is Charles A. Garfield’s Peak Performers (1986), p. 156: it actually attributes the saying to George Pickering while making an unsupported claim that Einstein chalked it on his blackboard. A 1991 syndicated column repeats the blackboard story without Cameron. This run saw the investigations and an Internet Archive catalogue confirming the 1963 book, but not its restricted page 13; all wording and page-level evidence remain secondary. Google Books was not read because its robots.txt refused this researcher; JSTOR presented a client challenge. No local Einstein texts are held, so no claim of an exhaustive corpus search is made. Earlier single-clause precursors do not establish an earlier author of Cameron’s full pairing.

1. 1957Before it · credited to William Bruce CameronCameron publishes the first half while explaining why nominally equal student head counts can represent very different teaching loads.Not everything that can be counted counts.William Bruce Cameron, “The Elements of Statistical Confusion Or: What Does the Mean Mean?”, AAUP Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 1 (Spring 1957), p. 34. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
2. 1963Earliest found · credited to William Bruce CameronCameron combines both clauses in Informal Sociology; this is QI’s earliest located full pairing.not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 13. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
3. 1986Credited to George Pickering; allegedly written on a blackboard by Albert EinsteinGarfield attaches the saying to a story about Einstein’s blackboard while crediting the words to George Pickering; this is not a contemporaneous Einstein source.Charles A. Garfield, Peak Performers: The New Heroes of American Business (New York: William Morrow, 1986), p. 156. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
4. 11 February 1991Spread · credited to Albert EinsteinA syndicated newspaper column repeats the Einstein blackboard story without naming Cameron.L. M. Boyd, “This and That: Shy Suffer Hay Fever,” Ellensburg Daily Record (11 February 1991), p. 8. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source

Cameron’s sociology textbook contrasts easily tabulated information with the harder problem of deciding which social facts matter. In the passage quoted by Quote Investigator, he imagines running sociological data through IBM machines and then warns that measurement and significance do not coincide.

A measurable fact is not necessarily important, and important things are not necessarily measurable.

Often presented as Einstein’s warning against quantification, sometimes with a story about his office blackboard. The documented source is Cameron’s sociology, not an authenticated Einstein remark; the warning concerns the limits of measurement, not its wholesale rejection.

• There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for. (misattributed) Albert Camus
• Only the educated are free. Epictetus
• The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. (not found) Mahatma Gandhi
• Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts. Bernard Baruch
• The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. (not found) Mark Twain

• quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-einstein
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Misattributed
• archive.org/details/informalsociolog0000will

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Attributed to Albert Einstein. No. The best-supported author is sociologist William Bruce Cameron, who printed the full maxim in 1963; the later Einstein blackboard story is unsupported. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/not-everything-that-counts-can-be-counted/ (checked 25 October 2026).

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