Darrell Huff famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's 'big lie'; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.
-- Darrell Huff

#Lying #Bigs #Wells
The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.
-- Darrell Huff

#Mean #Cost #Use
A difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.
-- Darrell Huff

#Differences #Making A Difference
It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it.
-- Darrell Huff

#Emotional #Where You Are #Dangerous
Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week.
-- Darrell Huff

#Cold #Week #Seven
Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.
-- Darrell Huff

#Imagination #Novelists #Scope
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

#Honesty #Mean #Data

Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.
The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.
The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths embedded in the consciousness of all.
Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
Glamour: the indefinable something about a girl with a big bosom.
Big Dreams start with small unreasonable acts
The big problem is not whether the Bible is true. The big problem is whether it is true in you.
Connecting expands possibilities - in work and in life - for ourselves as well as for others.
If you can serve everyone who visits you, you must be doing well in business.
The literati in their cellarsPerform semantic tarantellas.I wish I did it half as well as them.

Darrell Huff famous quotes

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