Statistics Quotes
53 quotes
"There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics."
"Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious."
"A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey."
"In the business people with expertise, experience and evidence will make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition and imagination."
"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet."
"How easy it is for so many of us today to be undoubtedly full of information yet fully deprived of accurate information."
"We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates."
"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."
"Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again."
"What nature hath joined together, multiple regression analysis cannot put asunder."
"Some of the greatest masterpieces of art are created against the odds of reality.from the book: stuff i think about"
"Conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical prove of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human's curiosity for the unknown, however small the chance of a positive outcome maybe."
"All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile."
"...that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable."
"While it might have surprised onlookers, undergraduates in the 2000s were in fact having less sex than their predecessors in the 1980s and '90s - if you accepted their definition of sex as vaginal intercourse. (Those of us who grew up during the Clinton years learned from our president that activities other than intercourse do not constitute "sexual relations," however intimate they may be.)"
"My biggest hope for this work is that it will help others to remember the sacrifices made for our freedom, and even more so to remember that the men, women, and children all involved in and affected by this era were not just statistics: they were people just like we are, with the same hopes, dreams, and very imminent fears."
"If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general."
"A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming as necessary for everyone living in this world of today as reading and writing."
"By the time your perfect information has been gathered, the world has moved on."
"[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing."
"Stats don't measure an athlete's hunger."
"With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias."
"The shock which the Nazi horrors produced was so great, because they came after two hundred years of Roussellian propaganda about the goodness of human nature and also because the Germans were literate, clean, technologically progressive, hard working, “modern,” sober, “orderly,” and so forth. Yet about human nature we get more concrete and more pertinent information from the Bible than from statistics dealing with secondary education, the frequency of bathtubs or the mileage of superhighways."
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
"He who says that someone isn’t himself is a victim of statistics."
"We encounter regression to the mean almost every day of our lives. We should try to anticipate it, recognize it, and not be fooled by it."
"Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly."
"Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]"
"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable."
"In a world with amazing amounts of statistics and demographics available, If you don't utilize foresight, statistics, demographics, projections and predictions the competition will."
"Statistics is the grammar of science."
"The Government are very keen on amassing statistics - they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams."
"Marriage counselors in particular all strongly recommend divorcees try to understand their role in a divorce before re-marrying. Statistics show if you re-marry before you've clearly seen things from the biter's point of view - you're re-bounded to fail again!"
"With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.'"
"In many college classes, laptops depict split screens - notes from a class, and then a range of parallel stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on Facebook."
"We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place."
"Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn't mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything."
"Total violent crime in the United States 2013: (Number:1,163,146), (Rate per 100,000: 367.9)."
"Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics."
"When it is a law abiding common person versus the police internal affairs regarding a corrupt or incompetent police officer, the statistics show that it is the common person that most frequently loses."
"In 2012, an estimated 14,827 persons were murdered in the United States.-- Federal Bureau of Investigation"
"99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story."
"...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics."
"Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy."
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't
"You can flip a coin but Schrodinger's pet cat will still be in that box."
"If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense."
"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
"I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged."
"Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!"
"When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight."
Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
"If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers."
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