I probably heard this idiom first around 1980. During my professional years from 1971 (first publication) to 2016 (last publication) matters around the ever increasing pressure to publish have changed dramatically. Great mathematicians around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century could get by with a dozen publications. Today this is unthinkable. And even worse, the value of a scientist is measuered by scitation indices. Today numbers rule and quantification of everything, including evaluation,  has a huge impact on what the sciences are and how the sciences continue to develop.