Statistical Quotes & Sayings

By relying on the statistical information rather than a gut feeling, you allow the data to lead you to be in the right place at the right time. To remain as emotionally free from the hurly burley of the here and now is one of the only ways to succeed. — James O'Shaughnessy

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence. — Anthony Giddens

The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ. — John Boyle O'Reilly

When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief. [ ... ] The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. [ ... ] You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them. — Daniel Kahneman

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

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. — Steven Pinker

Including the differential mortgage loan approval rates between Asian Americans and whites shows that the same methods to conclude that that blacks are discriminated against in mortgage lending would also lead to the conclusion that whites are discriminated against in favor of Asian Americans, reducing this whole procedure to absurdity, since no one believes that banks are discriminating against whites ... [W]hen loan approval rates are not cited, but loan denial rates are, that creates a larger statistical disparity, since most loans are approved. Even if 98 percent of blacks had their mortgage loan applications approved, if 99 percent of whites were approved than by quoting denial rates alone it could be said that blacks were rejected twice as often as whites. — Thomas Sowell

I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. My cousin was simply the easiest and most obvious target. — Iain Banks

The Vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest The organised charity, scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."1 - John Boyle O'Reilly — Tim Pat Coogan

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes. — Rudolph A. Marcus

I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not, in fact, think it at all odd
the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to be negligible. I did not express this view, but said sympathetically that the military life must be difficult to combine with the domestic. — Sarah Caudwell

I realize that Camilla is out very own statistical anomaly, an outlier that no one seems to know where to place. — Melissa Keil

when does an electron know when to jump, and how does it decide where to jump? Reasonably enough, Rutherford wanted to know what underlying process controlled the quantum jumping: "Bohr's answer was remarkable. Bohr suggested that the whole process was fundamentally random, and could only be considered by statistical methods: every change in the state of an atom should be regarded as an individual process, incapable of more detailed description. We are here so far removed from a causal description that an atom may in general even be said to possess a free choice between various possible transitions. — Andrew Thomas

It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct. — Marvin Minsky

Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders. — William Golding

For instance, a new kind of rich person named John Henry bought the Florida Marlins in January 1999. Most baseball owners were either heirs, or empire builders of one sort or another, or both. Henry had made his money in the intelligent end of the financial markets. He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs. Inefficiencies in the financial markets had made Henry a billionaire - and he saw some familiar idiocies in the market for baseball players. — Anonymous

A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. — Florence Nightingale

and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all — Steven Pinker

Miracles are statistical improbabilities. And fate is an illusion humanity uses to comfort itself in the dark. There are no absolutes in life, save death. — Amie Kaufman

I like to do projects in which you can see statistical results. I am very happy for all these small children, who have been the biggest group of victims of iodine deficiency. — Anatoly Karpov

Scientists study only those aspects of the universe that it is within their gift to study: what is observable; what is measurable and amenable to statistical analysis; and, indeed, what they can afford to study within the means and time available. Science thus emerges as a giant tautology, a "closed system". It can present us with robust answers only because its practitioners take very great care to tailor the questions. — Colin Tudge

We may at once admit that any inference from the particular to the general must be attended with some degree of uncertainty, but this is not the same as to admit that such inference cannot be absolutely rigorous, for the nature and degree of the uncertainty may itself be capable of rigorous expression. — Sir Ronald Fisher

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. — Neil Postman

Sanity was statistical. — George Orwell

Male aggressiveness consists in asking a woman to have intercourse and waiting for her to say yes, or a definite no. Skilful tacticians enhance their chances of making out by distributing their attentions among several women at a time (one version of 'playing the field') thus increasing their statistical chances for a favorable answer, depending on circumstances. This is the height of male aggressiveness that is tolerated. Genuine aggressiveness - rape - [men] have forbidden themselves by law. — Esther Vilar

What are you doing a study on right now?"
"A study on the statistical probablity of love at first sight. — Jennifer E. Smith

No data are excluded on subjective or arbitrary grounds. No one piece of data is more highly valued than another. The consequences of this policy have to be accepted, even if they prove awkward. — Jennifer K. McArthur

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. — Karl Marx

Both HUD and the Department of Justice began bringing lawsuits against mortgage bankers when a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants were turned down for mortgage loans. A substantial majority of both black and white mortgage loan applicants had their loans approved but a statistical difference was enough to get a bank sued. — Thomas Sowell

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. — Jaron Lanier

It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances. — Steve Martin

Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth — Anwar Shaikh

The world 'out there' is an exceedingly complicated mass of sensations, events, and turmoil. With Thomas Kuhn, I do not believe that the human mind is capable of organizing a structure of ideas that can come even close to describing what is really out there. Any attempt to do so contains fundamental faults. Eventually, those faults will become so obvious that the scientific model must be continuously modified and eventually discarded in favor of a more subtle one. We can expect the statistical revolution will eventually run its course and be replaced by something else. — David Salsburg

Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality ... The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown. — Barbara Duden

The institutional arrangement whereby most professional economists are heavily burdened with teaching and administrative duties may militate against a sufficient admixture of the more laborious forms of statistical and field work. — Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does. — Christopher Hitchens

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. — Richard Dawkins

Reducing intelligence to the statistical analysis of large data sets "can lead us," says Levesque, "to systems with very impressive performance that are nonetheless idiot-savants. — Nicholas Carr

And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. — Paul Bloom

He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring "Sanity is not statistical," with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom. — George Orwell

statistical reality is the only one, then that is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgment and decision are not only superfluous but impossible. — C. G. Jung

The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle. — Werner Heisenberg

I focus on the most important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy
that is, the inability to reason about uncertainties and risk. — Gerd Gigerenzer

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. — George Orwell

We live in an era of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of "forces," "pressures," "processes," and "developments." It is easy to forget that those "forces" are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The habit of submerging the individual into abstractions can lead not only to bad science (it's not as if the "social forces" obeyed Newton's laws) but to dehumanization. — Steven Pinker

An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results. — Edmund Phelps

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. — Sara Sheridan

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions. — Karl Schroeder

There is a tendency in all of us to ask for better statistical performance. There is a tendency to impose quotas behind which usually lies imposition of pressure to achieve improved statistics. — Gordon B. Hinckley

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, ... has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' ... it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control. — Alfie Kohn

She said, "What would you do if you left?" "I'm not sure. Get a doctorate maybe. I know some people who work in think tanks. I'd want to talk to them. Sound them out." She gave him a sour look. The term made her unhappy - think tank - and he didn't blame her. Passive, mild, middle-aged, ivory-towerish. People rustling papers in redoubts of social strategy. Situation reports, policy alternatives, statistical surveys. He — Don DeLillo

It is enough for a Psychohistorian, as such, to know his Biostatistics and his Neurochemical Electromathematics. Some know nothing else and are fit only to be statistical technicians. But a Speaker must be able to discuss the Plan without mathematics. — Isaac Asimov

We went through the records and we found over five hundred of his patients who were alive and well five years after their treatment, with no cancer. And Dr. Burton didn't selectively give us these. These were "take what you want. Here are the patients I treated." So there was statistical improvement - more so than any cancer institution in the United States could show. — Gary Null

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

In microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner. — M.L. Von Franz

There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. — Daniel Kahneman

Statistical projections which speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind, possess the advantage of fixing the attention on a great number of important facts. — Alexander Von Humboldt

No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously. — E. O. Wilson

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear. — Samuel R. Delany

We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics. — J. Willard Gibbs

Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University. — George Stigler

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life
a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality
then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act? — Gloria Steinem

On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer. — Lewis Mumford

The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living. — Barbara Hambly

A common refrain among theoretical physicists is that the fields of quantum field theory are the "real" entities while the particles they represent are images like the shadows in Plato's cave. As one who did experimental particle physics for forty years before retiring in 2000, I say, "Wait a minute!" No one has ever measured a quantum field, or even a classical electric, magnetic, or gravitational field. No one has ever measured a wavicle, the term used to describe the so-called wavelike properties of a particle. You always measure localized particles. The interference patterns you observe in sending light through slits are not seen in the measurements of individual photons, just in the statistical distributions of an ensemble of many photons. To me, it is the particle that comes closest to reality. But then, I cannot prove it is real either. — Victor J. Stenger

I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion. — Alfred Binet

You know what I hate, man? Guys that you know haven't seen the film: they just quote a bunch of statistical bullshit. — Jon Gruden

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. — Sam Kean

Amos and I called our first joint article "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers." We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that "intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well." We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their "statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible. — Daniel Kahneman

A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made. — Morris H. DeGroot

A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming as necessary for everyone living in this world of today as reading and writing. — H.G.Wells

The reason for your poor projections is often right in front of you. Whether you are using statistical analysis or just an average, sometimes the way you are calculating your numbers doesn't make any sense. Sometimes it's best to get up, take a walk, and revisit your calculations later. I have returned to my work many times and said: "Why the hell would I calculate it like that?" — Des MacHale

For ecommerce data derived from digital experiences, such as the keywords and phrases from search engines to the frequency of purchases of various customer segments, data is most often not normally distributed. Thus, much of the classic and Bayesian statistical methods taught in schools are not immediately applicable to digital ecommerce data. That does not mean that the classic methods you learned in college or business school do not apply to digital data; it means that the best analysts understand this fact. — Judah Phillips

An aging beau. He has probably tried to screw half his staff and doubtless attributes to his charm the few successes that are simply statistical anomalies. — Pierre Lemaitre

If we had enough data then this statistical approach would undoubtedly sort out these things, and a lot of problems are arising precisely because we haven't got enough documents for the statistical approach to be wholly valid. I know you can calculate levels of probability and so forth, but to establish this really clearly we want a lot more information than we have actually got available. This is surely our major problem that we are still at the very limits at which you can use a technique of this sort. - John Chadwick — Jennifer K. McArthur

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order. — Frank Herbert

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex. — Stephen Baker

I don't think baseball could survive without all the statistical appurtenances involved in calculating pitching, hitting and fielding percentages. Some people could do without the games as long as they got the box scores. — John M. Culkin

Woman in heels stands a statistical likelihood of ending her evening with her shoes in her handbag, barefoot and demanding a piggyback to the taxi stand in order to "keep her tights clean." Men are invariably the pig whose back is called for. — Caitlin Moran

This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to a considerable extent interchangeable concepts of theoretical analysis (Gibbs theory). Naturally, this is not an accident. The methods of physics and chemistry are ideally suited for dealing with homogeneous classes with their interchangeable components. But experience shows that the objects of biology are radically inhomogeneous both as systems (structurally) and as classes (generically). Therefore, the method of biology and, consequently, its results will differ widely from the method and results of physical science. — Walter M. Elsasser

His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another. — Robert Musil

Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children. — William Poundstone

Fairness is not about statistical equality. — John Bercow

Sanity is not statistical. — George Orwell

In high school algebra, someone had already worked out the formulas. The teacher knew them or could find them in the teacher's manual for the textbook. Imagine a word problem where nobody knows how to turn it into a formula, where some of the information is redundant and should not be used, where crucial information is often missing, and where there is no similar example worked out earlier in the textbook. This is what happens when one tries to apply statistical models to real-life problems. — David Salsburg

Without bragging, I've been blessed to have five of the greatest statistical years for a running back. — Shaun Alexander

The behavior of temperature and heat and so forth can certainly be understood in terms of atoms: That's the subject known as "statistical mechanics." But it can equally well be understood without knowing anything whatsoever about atoms: That's the phenomenological approach we've been discussing, known as "thermodynamics." It is a common occurrence in physics that in complex, macroscopic systems, regular patterns emerge dynamically from underlying microscopic rules. Despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, there is no competition between fundamental physics and the study of emergent phenomena; both are fascinating and crucially important to our understanding of nature. — Sean Carroll

Comparisons should be restricted to statistical figures and studies. When you compare yourself with others, two sorts of situations arise- You find yourself better than others You find yourself below others Both the situations could go against you. — Zayne Parker

People who meet in airports are seventy-two percent more likely to fall for each other than people who meet anywhere else. — The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight

It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism' which produces 'order from disorder' and the new one, producing 'order from order'. — Erwin Schrodinger

Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million. — Joseph Stiglitz

Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future ... We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken. — Eric Hoffer

Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants. — Michael Crichton

In the real world of research, conventional tests of [statistical] significance seem almost worthless. — Fischer Black

In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption. — Noam Chomsky

Whether we like it or not, quantification in history is here to stay for reasons which the quantifiers themselves might not actively approve. We are becoming a numerate society: almost instinctively there seems now to be a greater degree of truth in evidence expressed numerically than in any literary evidence, no matter how shaky the statistical evidence, or acute the observing eye. — J. H. Plumb

The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing. — Hubert M. Blalock

There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality. — C. G. Jung