Statistics Quotes

We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.

Statistics show 50% of the people use the internet. The rest have sex with real people.

Round numbers are always false.

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

According to statistics, it's a lot easier to get hit by lightning than to win a Lotto jackpot. The good side: you don't hear from your relatives.

Statistically, it would be insanity to go into the theatre for money. According to the statistics, you should just stay home. The odds are just incredible.

This book fills a much-needed gap.

And he will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.

Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago no matter what some folks say. You can see it not just in statistics, you see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we're not where we need to be. And all of us have more work to do.

Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

I have made 70 or so films. In all my films not a single actor, a single extra, was hurt. Not one. So statistics are on my side when I say I'm clinically sane.

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.

Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-postsfor support rather than illumination.

In the patient who succumbed, the cause of death was evidently something which was not found in the patient who recovered; this something we must determine, and then we can act on the phenomena or recognize and foresee them accurately. But not by statistics shall we succeed in this; never have statistics taught anything, and never can they teach anything about the nature of the phenomenon.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

America already holds the record for freak movements. Now we have a new one. It's called "Restoring Confidence." Rich men who never had a mission in life outside of watching a stock ticker are working day and night "restoring confidence." Writers are working night shifts, speakers' tables are littered up, ministers are preaching statistics, all on "restoring confidence."

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

In the long run we are all dead.

You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation.

Years ago a statistician might have claimed that statistics deals with the processing of data. . . to-days statistician will be more likely to say that statistics is concerned with decision making in the face of uncertainty.

Statistics may be defined as the discipline concerned with the treatment of numerical data derived from groups of individuals.

The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain.

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

Statistics vary, but in less than seven years there won't be a single cell left in any of our bodies that's the same as it is today. This means that any human being who 'wants' to change is like a mountain river wanting to reach the valley floor. It's a done deal; that's what mountain rivers do, and 'changing' should be our first nature.

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

You see, but you do not observe.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief.

What is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.

Action will furnish belief,-but will that belief be the true one? This is the point, you know.

That is probable which for the most part usually comes to pass, or which is a part of the ordinary beliefs of mankind.

I really don't care much about baseball, or looking at ball games, major or minor. All my interest in baseball is in its statistics.

Awards mean a lot, but they don't say it all. The people in baseball mean more to me than statistics.

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny should take a few pointers from the mutual-fund industry. All three are trying to pull off elaborate hoaxes. But while Santa and the bunny suffer the derision of eight year olds everywhere, actively-managed stock funds still have an ardent following among otherwise clear-thinking adults. This continued loyalty amazes me. Reams of statistics prove that most of the fund industry's stock pickers fail to beat the market.

Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.

It stands, essentially, for the application of increased energy to the efforts already undertaken by my ministry since 1934 with the results shown in the above statistics.

People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.

It is well known that strong to violent tornado activity in the US has decreased markedly since statistics began in the 1950s, which has also been a period of average warming. So, if anything, global warming causes FEWER tornado outbreaks...not more. In other words, more violent tornados would, if anything, be a sign of 'global cooling,' not 'global warming.'

Half of all kids in public education are below the poverty line. Two-thirds of the achievement gap comes from factors outside of school. Teachers influence about seven to ten percent of what happens in kids' lives. When you think about those statistics, you have to think about how to re-envision education so it's holistic and so we share responsibility.

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.