Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dennis Prager

There is a sly bait-and-switch in Prager's setup: he grants science its prestige, then uses that prestige as a foil for smuggling in a different authority entirely - moral common sense. By framing the "scientific age" as a cultural gatekeeper that demands metrics "to be taken seriously", he’s not arguing with science so much as with scientism: the idea that quantification is the only route to truth. The move works because it taps a familiar irritation with bureaucratic life and data-speak, where spreadsheets can feel like a substitute for judgment.

The subtext is defensive and political as much as philosophical. Prager often speaks from a moral-traditionalist posture, and this line quietly protects certain values from the scrutiny that modern institutions tend to apply. If the most important things "cannot be precisely defined or measured", then they can’t be fully audited, empirically litigated, or reduced to policy performance indicators. That doesn’t just elevate love and beauty; it also shields "decency", a word doing heavy lifting here - implying a shared moral baseline that may be contested in pluralistic culture wars.

The rhetorical engine is the closing question, a classic persuasion tactic: ask readers to agree with an obvious "no", then let that agreement spill over into the broader claim that measurement is overreaching. It’s effective because it’s true that love and beauty resist clean metrics, but it also blurs an important distinction: being hard to measure isn’t the same as being beyond evidence, debate, or disciplined reasoning.