Statistics Quotes
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Quotes #1
“99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story.”- Ron DeLegge II
Quotes #2
“All the statistics in the world can’t measure the warmth of a smile.”- Chris Hart
Quotes #3
“If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford
Quotes #4
“… a hypothesis test tells us whether the observed data are consistent with the null hypothesis, and a confidence interval tells us which hypotheses are consistent with the data.” – William C. Blackwelder
Quotes #5
“… the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.” –R. A. Fisher
Quotes #6
“… the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.” – R. A. Fisher
Quotes #7
“[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the science of man.” – Sir Francis Galton
Quotes #8
“A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.” –Thomas Carlyle
Quotes #9
“Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds-and fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.” –Cassius J. Keyser
Quotes #10
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quotes #11
“An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.” –John Tukey
Quotes #12
“Facts speak louder than statistics” –Mr. Justice Streatfield (1950)
Quotes #13
“By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece.” –Miguel de Cervantes from Don Quixote
Quotes #14
“God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.” –Stephen William Hawking
Quotes #15
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts–for support rather than illumination.” –Andrew Lang
Quotes #16
“If … we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.” –R. A. Fisher
Quotes #17
“If all the statisticians in the world were laid head to toe, they wouldn’t be able to reach a conclusion” Anon., after comment on economists by G. B. Shaw
Quotes #18
“If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself.” –Ghandi
Quotes #19
“If you need statistics to prove it, it isn’t true.” One of Barbara Doyle’s Professors
Quotes #20
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”- Lord Ernest Rutherford
Quotes #21
“In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure… and forget that there is a difference.” –George Udny Yule
Quotes #22
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” –Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Quotes #23
“Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.” –John Finley
Quotes #24
“Models should be as simple as possible, but not more so.” -Attributed to Einstein
Quotes #25
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.” -R. A. Fisher
Quotes #26
“Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.” -R. A. Fisher
Quotes #27
“No aphorism is more frequently repeated in connection with field trials, than that we must ask Nature few questions, or, ideally, one question at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logical and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed, if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed.” -R. A. Fisher
Quotes #28
“Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book.” Isaiah, XXX 8
Quotes #29
“Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.” -John Tukey
Quotes #30
“Randomization is too important to be left to chance.”- J. D. Petruccelli
Quotes #31
“Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.” –H.G.Wells
Quotes #32
“Statistics are no substitute for judgment.” -Henry Clay
Quotes #33
“Statistics are the heart of democracy.” -Simeon Strunsky
Quotes #34
“Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death” -Hilaire Belloc
Quotes #35
“Statistics is the grammar of science.” -Karl Pearson
Quotes #36
“Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.” -George E. P. Box
Quotes #37
“The aim … is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model . . . . The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the ‘real’ world the model purports to describe.” -H. Simon
Quotes #38
“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts… Seek simplicity and distrust it.” -A. N. Whitehead
Quotes #39
“The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.” -Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace
Quotes #40
“The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience.” Milton Friedman
Quotes #41
“The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.” –John Boyle O’Reilly
Quotes #42
“The science of statistics is the chief instrumentality through which the progress of civilization is now measured, and by which its development hereafter will be largely controlled.” -S. N. D. North
Quotes #43
“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work”-John Von Neumann
Quotes #44
“Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.” -W. H. Auden
Quotes #45
“We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them.” -William James
Quotes #46
“While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.”- Elizur Wright
Quotes #47
“You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that your younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.” -Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born.
Quotes #48
“You can’t fix by analysis what you bungled by design.” –Light, Singer and Willett, page v
Quotes #49
“You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs while they still have the power to heal.” –Armand Trousseau, 19 Century French physician
Quotes #50
“…when one considers that there are more than 750,000 police officers in the United States and that these officers have tens of millions of interactions with citizens each year, it is clear that police shootings are extremely rare events and that few officers–less than one-half of 1 percent each year–ever shoot anyone.” ― David Klinger, Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force
Quotes #51
“A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.” – Banksy
Quotes #52
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistics.” – Joseph Stalin
Quotes #53
“All statistics have outliers.” ― Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
Quotes #54
“All the statistics in the world can’t measure the warmth of a smile.” ― Chris Hart
Quotes #55
“Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler’s fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That’s what is at the root of such ideas as “her luck has run out” and “He is due.” That does not happen. For what it’s worth, a good streak doesn’t jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store.” – Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
Quotes #56
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”- Mark Twain
Quotes #57
“He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment’s thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.” ― James Jones, The Thin Red Line
Quotes #58
“I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys–but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly! ― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character
Quotes #59
“I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.” ― Roger Jones
Quotes #60
“If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.” ― Ernest Rutherford
Quotes #61
“Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.” ― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time
Quotes #62
“Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination” ― Andrew Lang
Quotes #63
“Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary.” ― Gottfried Leibniz
Quotes #64
“Of course, if 40% of women need oxytocin to progress normally, then something is wrong with the definition of normal.” ― Henci Goer, Obstetric Myths Versus Research Realities: A Guide to the Medical Literature
Quotes #65
“Once upon a time there was much talk of the apathy of the masses. Their silence was the crucial fact for an earlier generation. Today, however, the masses act not by deflection but by infection, tainting opinion polls and forecasts with their multifarious phantasies. Their abstention and their silence are no longer determining factors (that stage was still nihilistic); what counts now is their use of the cogs in the workings of uncertainty. Where the masses once sported with their voluntary servitude, they now sport with their involuntary incertitude. Unbeknownst to the experts who scrutinize them and the manipulators who believe they can influence them, they have grasped the fact that politics is virtually dead, and that they now have a new game to play, just as exciting as the ups and downs of the stock market. This game enables them to make audiences, charismas, levels of prestige and the market prices of images dance up and down with an intolerable facility. The masses had been deliberately demoralized and de-ideologized in order that they might become the live prey of probability theory, but now it is they who destabilize all images and play games with political truth.” ― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
Quotes #66
“One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.” ― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Quotes #67
“Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.” ― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
Quotes #68
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” ― Donald Rumsfeld
Quotes #69
“Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious.” ― Scott Dikkers, You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day
Quotes #70
“Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?” ― Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase
Quotes #71
“Statistics, likelihoods, and probabilities mean everything to men, nothing to God.” ― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year
Quotes #72
“The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
Quotes #73
“This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called “literary economics,” as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the “new economic history.” A man does what he can, and in the more elegant – one is tempted to say “fancier” – techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as “dummy variables.” The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.” ― Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
Quotes #74
“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.” ― E.M. Forster
Quotes #75
“We are not randomly suboptimal in our decisions. We are systematically suboptimal.” ― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.
Quotes #76
“We need to design aircraft or automotive displays to counteract visual illusions and we need to design statistical graphics to counteract probability illusions.” ― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.
Quotes #77
“Whenever I read statistical reports, I try to imagine my unfortunate contemporary, the Average Person, who, according to these reports, has 0.66 children, 0.032 cars, and 0.046 TVs.” ― Kato Lomb
Quotes #78
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable. ― Mark Twain
Quotes #79
If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment. ― Ernest Rutherford
Quotes #80
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. ― H.G, Wells
Quotes #81
Statisticians like artists have the bad habit of falling in love with their models. ― George E Box
Quotes #82
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death. ― Hilaire Belloc
Quotes #83
“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ― Benjamin Disraeli