Anecdotal Quotes & Sayings

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century
the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports. — Don DeLillo

What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence," Harry explained. "It doesn't carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that's because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they're up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter. — Robert Klein

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless. — Katherine Dunn

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell. — Jan Morris

Society conspires against her from early infancy. Her brain is steadily filled with plaster until it sets: 'If you're not married by the time you're twenty-five, you'll have good reason to be ashamed'; 'if you laugh, you won't look dignified' ; 'if your face betrays your feelings, you'll look coarse'; 'if you mention the existence of a single body hair, you're repulsive' ; 'if a boy kisses you on the cheek in public, you're a whore'; if you enjoy eating, you're a pig'; 'if you take pleasure in sleeping, you're no better than a cow'; and so on.

These precepts would be merely anecdotal if they weren't taken so much to heart. — Amelie Nothomb

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. — Clement Greenberg

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn't relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me ... the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn't see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News. — William Klein

Before Twitter or Facebook, all the fandom that I knew about was anecdotal. — Rob Thomas

For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments. — Guy Consolmagno

Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'. — Barry Schwartz

According to both scientific and anecdotal research, it is clear that homework should be the exception, not the rule. Even the most inventive or meaningful assignments still infringe on the time that belongs to families. — Vicki Abeles

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training. — Michael Shermer

It's the effect of these carbohydrates on insulin that would explain the dietary observations - the futility of calorie restriction, the relative ease of weight loss when carbohydrates are restricted, and perhaps two centuries of anecdotal observations that sweets, starches, bread, and beer are uniquely fattening. — Gary Taubes

I had self-doubt about whether my story was interesting to people. I didn't want to write something that was anecdotal. It was important to me that people would get something out of my book. I want people to read it and say, "Now I don't feel so alone," or "I'm going to remember that next time I'm being an asshole." — Lizz Winstead

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided
anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep. — Carl Sagan

The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact. — Georges Braque

To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern - a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson's language to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, 'close reading' also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism. — Terry Eagleton

Anecdotal tales of combat are meaningless to Americans, we absorb tales of violence like a sponge. Mythological violence is second nature to us. The real thing is not. War begins long before battle. It begins when we are boys longing for the initiation rite of the warrior and everything it promises: sexual prowess and sexual license. War lasts long after the last bullet is fired; into old age and death we go carrying a secret knowledge that no one wants to know about. War is the opposite of sexual prowess. War is desire stripped of humanity. — Alfredo Vea

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be. — Rene Dubos

I've been among their critics [MBA programs]. Much of what I've seen in business schools is quite non-rigorous. Anecdotal histories are stretched to illustrate favored slogans. Evidence of their effectiveness is similarly anecdotal. — Charles R. Morris

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know. — Herman Cain

It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal. — Eric Gill

It can only be hoped that the overwhelming factual (not anecdotal) evidence presented herein will arouse conductors and performers of all stripes to rededi-cate themselves to serving, rather than using, the art of music - espousing the notion and principle that a great composer's creations ought to be inherently respected and cherished. Perhaps one could then supplant the motto "nobody gives a damn about the composer" with the more benign, gracious - and simple - "all for the composer. — Gunther Schuller

People who watch 'Fox News,' you may say, and this is anecdotal, but they are passionate about it. In the most unlikely places, like down in Soho where I used to live, people would come up to me and thank me for it. People I didn't know from a bar of soap. People appreciate that at least they're being heard. It is much more watchable. — Rupert Murdoch

I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.) — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Google is one of the most incredible breakthroughs that we have today. Yes, it can scare a lot of patients, thinking we're all dying because we look up something on Google. But there's also a lot of anecdotal information from parents, firsthand accounts of what they did for their own child. — Jenny McCarthy

Life after death. Sex after marriage. While claims are made for the existence of both, the sources are oftentimes unreliable and the evidence, at best, anecdotal. — J.D. Lexx

It is through color changes that we go forward ... all decisions come about as the picture is made and in response to painterly demands. The descriptive and anecdotal come second. — Wolf Kahn

All former counter-insurgency officers categorically denied having perpetrated torture during the Terror. In the case of at least one such research participant, anecdotal evidence from mutual contacts suggested otherwise. It is impossible to tell who, if any, of the former counter-insurgency officers featured in this chapter perpetrated torture during the Bheeshanaya. Eliciting confessions is not the aim of this book. My interest lies, instead, in exploring the ways in which 'perpetrators' of violence remember and reconstruct their disturbing pasts, and how they come to terms with it in the present. — Dhana Hughes

The arts of conversation which his circle cultivated were, in great part, the gossipacious arts: that of making much out of little, of displaying your wit and inventive facility, your ability to amuse, without boring your listeners with too many ideas, or unpleasantly stretching their minds on the rack of an "issue." It was a world which took an intense but mainly anecdotal interest in people, and which was therefore also on its guard against just the same exposure of itself which it so assiduously sought to gain against others. — William H Gass

MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it - the harm that pornography does to women - is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence. — Richard Posner

There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth — Temple Grandin

I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life. — Richard Dawkins

If the young man ate candy, the wrangler says, that's probably what's kept him alive so long. Glucose is a natural antidote to cyanide poisoning. Based on anecdotal evidence, glucose binds with
the cyanide to produce less toxic compounds. — Chuck Palahniuk

scaremongers - who unquestioningly champion anecdotal data, while meticulously examining every large, carefully conducted study on the same subject for any small chink that would permit them to dismiss it entirely. — Ben Goldacre

Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. — John W. Loftus

Hardcovers will never completely disappear. They are delightful to hold; they feel weighty and substantial. But my anecdotal evidence suggests that the world is changing. — Christina Baker Kline

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it — Henry Mintzberg

It amazes me how much of what passes for knowledge in cancer therapy turns out to be incomplete, inadequate, and anecdotal. — Ralph W. Moss

This whole notion that all African-Americans are not going to vote for Obama is not necessarily true. I believe a third would vote for me, based on my own anecdotal feedback. Not vote for me because I'm black but because of my policies. — Herman Cain

The U.S has acquired reservoirs of goodwill around the globe over many years. But it is clear - from polling data and ample anecdotal evidence - that America is losing its allure in much of the world. — Lee H. Hamilton

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness. — Mary McCormack

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror. — Glen Duncan