Darrell Huff Quotes & Sayings

Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week. — Darrell Huff

IF YOU can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has. — Darrell Huff

Don't be a novelist
be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination. — Darrell Huff

A difference is a difference only if it makes a difference. — Darrell Huff

Just to clear the air, let's note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance. — Darrell Huff

Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails. — Darrell Huff

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's 'big lie'; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you. — Darrell Huff

It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it. — Darrell Huff

Extrapolations are useful, particularly in that form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or charts made from them, it is necessary to remember one thing constantly: The trend-to-now may be a fact, but the future trend represents no more than an educated guess. Implicit in it is "everything else being equal" and "present trends continuing." And somehow everything else refuses to remain equal, else life would be dull indeed. — Darrell Huff

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense. — Darrell Huff

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling. — Darrell Huff

Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers bring about a suspension of common sense — Darrell Huff