Quotes & Sayings About Statistics

Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000. — Rita Mae Brown

With those kinds of statistics, there are real concerns that cannot be explained away other than race. How long do we turn a blind eye to it?. — Richard Ney

Use statistics as input not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue.Don't make up your mind and then go looking for the number to support yourself. — Chip Heath

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations. — Isaiah Berlin

I always thought that if those psychic phone lines were for real, I could just call them and not say a word and the psychic on the other end of the phone would rattle off my vital statistics, then tell me all about my future. — Jeff Belanger

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor. — Edgar Fiedler

The pessimist is the man who believes things couldn't possibly be worse, to which the optimist replies: 'Oh yes they could!' — Vladimir Bukovsky

You read statistics all the time like, "13 million people are at risk because of the severe drought in East Africa," but I think those kinds of numbers fall on deaf ears - there's so much devastation in the world, that it's a bit overwhelming for people. — Scarlett Johansson

For instance, even though entrepreneurs in technology often know the statistics that about 80 percent of founders are forced out of their companies by their venture capital investors, I have never heard anyone tell me that this would happen to them. In — Jeffrey Pfeffer

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind ... — George E.P. Box

I can prove anything by statistics except the truth. — George Canning

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Statistics stay silent in us. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future - that if they're lucky, they'll manage to avoid welfare; and if they're unlucky, they'll die of a heroin — J.D. Vance

In 1973, I was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Diego. Although I was certainly not unhappy at Nottingham, I had been there over twenty years from starting undergraduate studies to Professor of Applied Statistics and Econometrics, and I thought that a change of scene was worth considering. — Clive Granger

The average American household's income declined for a second year in a row, the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show, down 0.9 percent to $64,432. The wealthiest fifth of Americans were an exception: Their incomes increased by 0.9 percent. Among the poorest fifth, incomes fell 3.5 percent. Taking taxes into account, — Anonymous

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on. — Thomas Carlyle

It's great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity. — Russell Smith

Attempt to influence public opinion by means of newspapers, radio, television, and advertising are based on two factors. On the one hand, they rely on sampling techniques that reveal the trend of "opinion" or "wants"-that is, of collective attitudes. On the other, they express the prejudices, projections, and unconscious complexes (mainly the power complex) of those who manipulate public opinion. But statistics do no justice to the individual. Although the average size of stones in a heap may be five centimeters, one will find very few stones of exactly this size in the heap. — C. G. Jung

More data means more information, but it also means more false information. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it. — William James

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don't make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself - that's asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we'll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others, — Chip Heath

The actual history of interracial rape - according to FBI statistics - is that, since the 70's, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by black men." (The Department of Justice uses "0" to denote fewer than ten victims. — Ann Coulter

99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story. — Ron DeLegge II

'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it. — Thomas Szasz

Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that. — Bill Gates

When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain. — Claude Bernard

By the time your perfect information has been gathered, the world has moved on. — Phil Dourado

I do not ... reject the use of statistics in medicine, but I condemn not trying to get beyond them and believing in statistics as the foundation of medical science ... Statistics ... apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still [uncertain or] indeterminate ... There will always be some indeterminism ... in all the sciences, and more in medicine than in any other. But man's intellectual conquest consists in lessening and driving back indeterminism in proportion as he gains ground for determinism by the help of the experimental method.. — Claude Bernard

Above all else show the data. — Edward R. Tufte

In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate. — Barry Glassner

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument. — Marilyn Vos Savant

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. — Guy Debord

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue. — Aldous Huxley

Whether statistics be an art or a science ... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test. — Adolphe Quetelet

Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues." — P. J. O'Rourke

To me, the main weakness of EDA is its failure to enquire why the data were collected in the first place and its consequent tendency to apply ingenious methods largely because they are so attractively ingenious. — Michael Healy

Human beings are prone to believe the things they wish were true. — Hal Clement

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time. — George Iles

Forget the statistics ... we have to do more. You cannot look these children in the eye and see how desperate is their situation without wanting to help. — Liam Neeson

In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death. — Gunter Grass

There are two ways of lying. One, not telling the truth and the other, making up statistics. — Josefina Vazquez Mota

The Democrats' response throughout the healthcare debate? Give the people more statistics. — Simon Sinek

Those who refused to respond to new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish. — Philip K. Dick

The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not. — James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important ... The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it? — Helen Keller

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era. — Story Musgrave

Coughs seem very common here, especially among the children, though people look strong and healthy, but in the absence of proper statistics one cannot undertake to say whether the district is a healthy one or not. — Edward Burnett Tylor

The chief instrument of American statistics is the census, which should accomplish a two-fold object. It should serve the country by making a full and accurate exhibit of the elements of national life and strength, and it should serve the science of statistics by so exhibiting general results that they may be compared with similar data obtained by other nations. — James A. Garfield

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action. — W. Edwards Deming

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

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.' — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times! — Steven Pinker

The value for which P=0.05, or 1 in 20, is 1.96 or nearly 2; it is convenient to take this point as a limit in judging whether a deviation ought to be considered significant or not. Deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are thus formally regarded as significant. Using this criterion we should be led to follow up a false indication only once in 22 trials, even if the statistics were the only guide available. Small effects will still escape notice if the data are insufficiently numerous to bring them out, but no lowering of the standard of significance would meet this difficulty. — Ronald A. Fisher

The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril ... It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public. — Winston Churchill

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable. — Mark Twain

Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history. — Molly Ivins

Statistics are there to be broken. — Chris Kamara

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. — Francis Bacon

Sometimes one must try anything, it is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom. — Philip K. Dick

Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way? — Philip K. Dick

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more. — William Blake

In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. — Bryan Stevenson

One thing I learned about Gordon Brown is you've got to have the strength to just get in there and take him on. When you first hear him spouting his statistics and boasting about his record, it can be quite intimidating. But over time, shadowing him, I just realised that a lot of it was rubbish; a lot of it was baloney. — George Osborne

Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.
This is not one of those memoirs. — Kate Madison

The analysis of statistics is a big part of the modern game, and it's important as a modern manager to embrace areas that can help your team and players improve. — Brendan Rodgers

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics. — Orhan Pamuk

(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses. — Simon Singh

To not look at the data is foolish, but to look at the data as having all the answers is even more foolish. It is a collision of new-school statistics and statisticians against old-school managers, coaches, and instructors. Neither side is right, neither is wrong; there is so much to be gained from listening to both sides. — Tim Kurkjian

Zeno was concerned with three problems ... These are the problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. — Bertrand Russell

With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.' — Amity Shlaes

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen. — Dick Cavett

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away. — Paul Brodeur

While statistics are interesting, they're all in the past. — Vince Lombardi

I thought the divorce statistics would never apply to me. I was beyond heartbroken when they did. But I got up and got on with it. I also kept my belief in marriage. — Jennifer Garner

After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way. — Isaac Asimov

On a good team there are no superstars. There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They have the ability to be superstars, but if they fit into a good team, they make sacrifices, they do things necessary to help the team win. What the numbers are in salaries or statistics don't matter; how they play together does. — Red Holzman

And if California slides into the ocean, as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this hotel will be standing until I've paid my bill. — Warren Zevon

Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays. — Philip J. Davis

For every two degrees the temperature goes up, check-ins at ice cream shops go up by 2%. — Andrew Hogue

Statistics are designed to keep you safe. — Jenny Diski

Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make. — Michelle Malkin

Not so very long ago there were medical authorities who did not "believe" in bacteria and consequently allowed twenty thousand young women to die of easily avoidable puerperal fever in Germany alone. The psychic catastrophes caused by the mental inertia of "experts" do not appear in any statistics, and from this it is concluded that they are non-existent. — C. G. Jung

As a child psychiatrist, I knew too much about the statistics of foster care - less than one percent graduate college with a bachelor's degree, more than fifty percent of foster kids end up homeless after reaching eighteen, and most are dead by twenty-six. — Penny Reid

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics. — George Bernard Shaw

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless. — Ashleigh Brilliant

In life I've always considered myself statistically challenged. I married my high school sweetheart and then he joined the Army. Lucky for me, love has nothing to do with statistics. — Shawn Kirsten Maravel

I think that could be perhaps a little misleading and even our statistics can mislead people at the times though they are not misleading in themselves. It is just that people get mislead — Norman Tebbit

The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy - a process that reached its peak during the 1980s - and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling. — Angela Y. Davis

On completing my degree, I started a Ph.D. in statistics, although I knew very little about the topic. My supervisor was Professor Harry Pitt, who was an excellent pure mathematician and probabilist. — Clive Granger

The fundamental confusion that makes income bracket data and individual income data seem mutually contradictory is the implicit assumption that people in particular income brackets at a given time are an enduring "class" at that level. If that were true, then trends over time in comparisons between income brackets would be the same as trends over time between individuals. Because that is not the case, the two sets of statistics lead not only to different conclusions but even opposite conclusions. — Thomas Sowell

When you look at statistics for the white community alone, you see that we've become two separate worlds in which the successful are educated and wait to have children until they are married, and those in poverty are primarily those without higher education and with children outside of marriage. — Rand Paul

This is not a dictatorship, this is based upon scientific evidence to support a given project. If you want to put up a building, say half a mile high, the material has to be available. Using statistics is not a dictatorship. It's a method of getting the most from existing resources. — Jacque Fresco

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list. — Brian Eno

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics — Daniel Kahneman

So strong is the power of superstition that even though we know that we have been reverencing a sham, yet still we hesitate to admit the validity of our new-found convictions. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data. — Leonard Mlodinow

The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired. — Major Owens

When statistics come in saying that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42 percent of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF SURVEY? — Caitlin Moran

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. — Henry David Thoreau