Margin Of Error Quotes & Sayings

Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small. — Donald Rumsfeld

Acting is like a high wire act. Your margin for error is very slim. — Christine Baranski

My calculations - allowing for a 12 percent margin of error, based on the radius of the corresponding confidence interval and the surgeon general's warning - concluded that they probably didn't stay behind for the tacos. — Darynda Jones

No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error. — Benjamin Graham

Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers", a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions. — Roberto Bolano

As much as you love to finish games and all that kind of stuff, at the same time as a starting pitcher you hate to come out of a game where your closer has no margin for error, ... So at least with one guy on, Braden's got a little margin to make a mistake. — Tom Glavine

The biggest thing, I think, is to stay healthy and make the fewest mistakes, and then you can win ... The margin of error is so small in the NFL, so if you can do those two things - keep your team healthy and make the fewest mistakes each Sunday - you have a good chance of going to the Super Bowl. — Hugh Douglas

I worry about 10, 15, 20, 25 years down the road. Where are we going to be in this age of nuclear weapons, where there is no margin for error? — Lincoln Chafee

Although her disobedience is tragic, Eve's innocence is not all bad. Certainly, that innocfence leads her to make a poor choice - the very worst - but the fact that she makes a choice at all, the fact that she engages the Devil in a debate which could go either way, the fact that she acts without God breathing down her neck - all speak for her free will or, what amounts to the same thing, her margin for error. It is from this margin for error that freedom springs, because you can't be free to right unless you can be free to be wrong. — Robert Rowland Smith

The claim of fine tuning is subjective. As I stated before, no measurement in physics is perfect. The amount of precision we demand can be increased or decreased at our whim. We could have an approximate measurement that has a huge margin of error and call it finely-tuned if we so desire. Theists, in particular, have a lot of such desire. They so badly want God to be an indispensable part of our universe's creation, so they see finely-tuned constants.
They also tend to sweep under the rug the following fact: the vast majority of our universe is hostile to life, and they fail to consider that another hand in the proverbial deck might yield a better universe than ours, one teaming with life on every planet throughout the cosmos. — G.M. Jackson

History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did. — Bruce Schneier

Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about - the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government - I wasn't left a lot of margin for error. It's kept me driven. — Ronan Farrow

The margin of error in astrology is plus or minus one hundred percent. — Calvin Trillin

Democrats lead in all the polls by at least ten points, except one.. Fox News. That is with a margin of error of plus or minus the facts. — Stephen Colbert

High leverage is unsafe, not just for a company but the entire economy ... LBOs are reducing the safety. Management loses the power to do many things. It has no margin for error and less margin for additional risk. — Franco Modigliani

A new poll shows only 3 percent strongly approve of the job Congress is doing, with a margin of error of 4 percent, so it's possible that "less than no one" thinks they're doing a good job. — Jay Leno

there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error. You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call with a new job offer. If you hurt your toe, you can take six weeks watching television and eating potato chips. — Josh Waitzkin

One of the cool things about ski racing is there is never a perfect run so it's hard to be satisfied in that sense, you can always go that extra step, i don't think any of us have the realistic goal of having the perfect run. Ski racing is the most variable sport out there, conditions change run-to-run, we only get one chance at it and the margin for error is tiny. — Ted Ligety

In the margin for error lies all our room for maneuver. — James Geary

The results of a new study are out this week saying that New Jersey is one of the most livable states in the country. The study has a margin of error of 100 percent. — Conan O'Brien

'Why do you think it is ... ', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.' — Michael J. Fox

The world is not perfect and neither am I; I live with a margin of error. — Steven Toushin

Finally, this case should serve as yet another reminder of just how dangerous and volatile these police home invasions really are, and why we should stop using them to serve search warrants for nonviolent crimes. They offer no margin for error. — Radley Balko

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely. — Paul Bettany

I support the death penalty. But I also think there has to be no margin for error. — George Ryan

I think I'm enjoying writing for me.I know what's in my head, so there's a little less margin for error, but I think I really would like to write for an artist, and obviously it really depends on the artist, and the sort of story I would do. — David Finch

There is also a psychological phenomenon at work here that I believe is particularly male. A woman or girl
presuming one could be induced to take part in this sort of activity in the first place
having burned her hair and eyebrows would conclude that she had been lucky and reduce the amount of gas she put into the balloon next time. The man doesn't come to the same conclusion at all. He, singed and blackened, arrives at the point of view that he still has a margin of error to play with. After all, he isn't dead, and he's hardly likely to burn his eyebrows off again. They've already gone, history; he's moved on. There can be but one deduction
the dose needs to be increased. — Mark Barrowcliffe

I fulfilled all the requirements for Clara Barcelo to send me packing, but I preferred to think that her blindness afforded me a margin for error and that my crime - my complete and pathetic devotion to a woman twice my age, my intelligence, and my height - would remain in the dark. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The point of simple living, for me has got to be:
A soft place to land
A wide margin of error
Room to breathe
Lots of places to find baseline happiness in each and every day — Leo Babauta

Theres a little more margin for error this year. Last year, it felt like we had to win every game. That wasnt a lot of fun. — Lance Berkman

When either grace is turned into painted, but rotten nature, as Arminians do, or into wantonness, as others do, the error to me is of a far other and higher elevation, than opinions touching church government. Tenacious adhering to Antinomian errors, with an obstinate and final persistence in them, both as touching faith to, and suitable practice of them, I shall think, cannot be fathered upon any of the regenerated; for it is an opinion not in the margin and borders, but in the page and body, and too near the centre and vital parts of the gospel. — Samuel Rutherford

I find comedy to be really scary, because it can go so wrong so easily, and the margin for error is so huge - and I guess that's what makes it funny, that tension. — Tatiana Maslany

Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or
thousands. [ ... ] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in
a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the
single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When
we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document
the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently
large that the forecast won't make for punchy headlines. — Nate Silver

Touch is more important than arm strength. You want to really allow the receiver to run underneath the throw. It'll give you a little margin for error if you undershoot it a bit. — Aaron Rodgers

If Jim Mora loses his job with the Falcons, it most likely will be because of wins and losses. Problem is, when you work for such an image-conscious owner and in the most fickle of sports towns, random acts of dumbness tend to shrink a guy's margin for error. — Jeff Schultz

A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world. — Seth Klarman

I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving. — Jessica Posner