The Bell Curve Quotes & Sayings

In America, we have this bell curve of certain values. And then we have another bell curve of different values, which is the Republican Party. And they're out of sync right now. — Foster Friess

It isn't fair that there's pressure exerted on those who choose to live on the edges of the bell-shaped curve of normal. — Laurel Lea

...the whole configuration of human development needs to be reconceptualized. A lifetime ought not to be thought of in linear manner, an ascending upward gradient, or a kind of bell-shaped curve in which persons develop from one stage of helplessness as an infant through a lifetime to a final stage of helplessness in old age... In...God resides the ultimate coherence from whom each passion for understanding, each new insight, new stage, new vision of the universe, derives its ultimate intelligibility and toward which all such phenomena point. — James E. Loder

Actually, the full bell curve goes: brilliant; pretty good; mediocre; mediocre and interminable; dire; vile; dire and vile; and dire, vile, and interminable. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the "normal," particularly with "bell curve" methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Theorem reste upon the validity of my longstanding argument that the world contains precisely two kinds of people:
Dumpers and Dumpees.
Everyone is predisposed to being either one or the other, but of course not all people are COMPLETE
Dumpers and Dumpees.
Hence the bell curve:
The majority of people fall somewhere close to the vertical dividing line with the occasional statisticaly outliner (e.g., me) representing a tiny percentage of overall individuals. The numerical expression of the graph can be something like 5 being extreme Dumper, and 0 being me. Ergo, if the Great One was a 4 and I am a 0, total size of the Dumper/Dumpee differetial = -4 (Assuming negative numbers if the guy is more of a Dumpee; positive if the girl is.) — John Green

High school is a pit of despair. It's a swirling tornado of insecurities and there's really nothing good about it. It's at the time where everybody is waking up with different opinions every day, and you're on this learning curve of who you are and who you want to be, and you're comparing yourself with every other male and female around you. There's no sense to it. — Kristen Bell

It's not just college grades that fall in a curve. Human decency is bell-shaped, with some of us slopping over the edges. Saints on one end, sinners on the other. — Alex Adams

The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over and we are headed for the power-law distribution of economic opportunities. Education per se is not going to make up the difference. — Erik Brynjolfsson

When you lie about yourself, is it to appear closer to or farther away from the middle of the bell curve? — Sheena Iyengar

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch. — Ken Follett

Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn't because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider. — Neal Stephenson

They laughed good-humoredly, mocking the sense of placelessness that comes when a child's development is not sheltered under the great umbrella of the bell curve. In the big world and even in this little red schoolhouse, Nathaniel was not an average kid but an outlier, at the map's edge where ships fall off the flat Earth and dragons roam. Suddenly I wished for a child with Down syndrome so he would not be peerless, in a class by himself. — Jeanne McDermott

LTCM is now a classic case of "fat tails" in finance. Portfolio math mimics diffusion physics - a scattergram of the outcomes from trillions of small random movements maps smoothly onto a bell curve. In well-behaved markets, finance looks much the same. But markets are rarely well-behaved for long, and big deviations from the norm happen very frequently in finance - the finance bell curve, that is, has fat tails. When Russia defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 1998, it was a fat tail for LTCM, and it was on the wrong side of the trade, with very heavy leverage. — Charles R. Morris

Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve. — Marcus Buckingham

I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents? — Joshua Foer

The Bell Curve might have been called Why Intelligence Matters, explaining the connection of intelligence to life outcomes; this book completes the syllogism. — Michael Levin

The world is a bell curve. Classroom test scores, employee performance in a company or how many people really, really like you. No matter the population you're studying, they always fit neatly across the standard deviations of the famous bell curve. — Simon Sinek

All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it. — Thomas Lennon

On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very fragmentation of the Internet allows us to find ourselves in other people - and to know that we are not alone. — Virginia Postrel

The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more ... the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow. — Lee Kuan Yew

Stay in the middle of the bell-curve of social norms and follow along, or you will find out the about freedom you never had. — Bryant McGill

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated pea-brain lizards didn't make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn't seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around. — John D. MacDonald

I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion - far from it: my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended. — John Taylor Gatto

Why would I wish my senses to be dulled when they could be sharpened? Why would I wish to mumble when I could scintillate? Why would I wish to forget when I could remember? Of course, since even in those days I was a loquacious workaholic who liked to stay up late, you might think I'd pick a drug that would nudge me closer to the center of the bell curve instead of pushing me farther out on the edge - but of course I didn't. Who does? Don't we all just keep doing the things that make us even more like ourselves? As I lay in bed with a godawful headache, sunlight streamed through the open window, and so did the smell of good French coffee from the hotel kitchen downstairs. — Anne Fadiman

This is the explanation I used to have on the site before my page got turned into an author's page.

Don't get butt hurt if I give you a 2 or 3 star rating. That means your book was good. I give very few 4 star ratings cause that means your book is gonna be a reread for me. I don't reread a lot of books. I think I gave less than a handful of 5 stars. 5 stars means that I think the book is a GREAT GREAT. Like a classic that will still be read in a 100 years, at least if I were alive it would be.

As you can see I don't buy into the hoopla that everybody is great. It's not true. Most are average. Some suck. Some are great. If you want a visual go google bell curve.

Life has winners and losers. Not everyone deserves a gold star. Suck it up. — D.R. Slaten

On the Internet, people on the tails of the bell curve can find one another. — Virginia Postrel

A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. — Steven D. Levitt

Paradoxically, the occult can often become the concern, in different modes, of both the least intelligent and also the most aberrantly intelligent human beings, with those soundly in the middle of the bell curve often unable to tell the difference between genuine intellectual exploration of the universe's unfathomable and mysterious structure and pre-literate superstition. — Jason Louv