No sociologist ... should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.
ATTRIBUTION:
Max Weber (1864–1920), German sociologist. “Science as a Vocation,” Essays in Sociology, eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1919, repr. 1946).
