Statistics famous quotes
04-24-2025
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What used to be called prejudice is now called a null hypothesis.
-- A. W. F. Edwards -
You only find complete unanimity in a cemetary.
-- Abel Aganbegyan -
According to FBI statistics for 2008, only 22 percent of murder victims were killed by strangers. More than 30 percent were slain by family members, boyfriends, and girlfriends. Nearly half of all murders were committed by friends, neighbors, and casual acquaintances.
-- Alafair Burke -
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
-- Alan Bennett -
It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
If you torture statistics long enough, they'll eventually confess the truth
-- Alan K. Simpson -
In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
-- Alan Kay -
And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art. . .
-- Albrecht Durer -
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
-- Aldous Huxley -
The customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so
-- Aleister Crowley -
Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime.
-- Alphonse Allais -
no study has brought out any solid evidence that the death penalty deters crime. In fact, Amnesty reports that 'the murder rate in states which use the death penalty is twice that of states which do not, according to FBI statistics.
-- Antoinette Bosco -
To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.
-- Aristotle -
You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs while they still have the power to heal.
-- Armand Trousseau -
The buffalo isn't as dangerous as everyone makes him out to be. Statistics prove that in the United States more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than are killed by buffalo.
-- Art Buchwald -
It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Training was one thing, reality another.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.
-- Arthur Eddington -
It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory.
-- Arthur Eddington -
Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.
-- Arthur Eddington -
Action will furnish belief,-but will that belief be the true one? This is the point, you know.
-- Arthur Hugh Clough -
I will listen to any hypothesis but on one condition-that you show me a method by which it can be tested.
-- August Wilhelm von Hofmann -
I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.
-- Ava DuVernay -
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
-- Ben Horowitz -
No matter what the statistics say there is always a way.
-- Bernie Siegel -
However, don't let these statistics mislead you, gang violence is not limited to California and or big urban areas - that might have been true a while ago but it is no longer the case today.
-- Bob Filner -
Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.
-- Bradley Efron -
Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.
-- Brian Eno -
Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?
-- Brian Kernighan -
We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.
-- Bruce Babbitt -
You are in big trouble when you start writing software to impress girls.
-- Bruce Ellis -
There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.
-- Caitlin Moran -
Lotteries, a tax upon imbeciles.
-- Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour -
The propositions of mathematics have, therefore, the same unquestionable certainty which is typical of such propositions as "All bachelors are unmarried," but they also share the complete lack of empirical content which is associated with that certainty: The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.
-- Carl Gustav Hempel -
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
-- Charles Caleb Colton -
Individual statistics, plate time and everything tend to come, but the most enjoyment I get out of baseball is actually winning.
-- Chili Davis -
All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile.
-- Chris Hart -
Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.
-- Clarence Darrow -
The first requirement in using statistics is that the facts treated shall be reduced to comparable units.
-- Claude Bernard -
In the patient who succumbed, the cause of death was evidently something which was not found in the patient who recovered; this something we must determine, and then we can act on the phenomena or recognize and foresee them accurately. But not by statistics shall we succeed in this; never have statistics taught anything, and never can they teach anything about the nature of the phenomenon.
-- Claude Bernard -
The goal of scientific physicians in their own science ... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
-- Claude Bernard -
Have you noticed that all the news, statistics, strategies about unemployment are provided by those who are employed? As soon as you are unemployed you cease to exist ...
-- Dale Spender -
Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious
-- Daniel Libeskind -
The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.
-- David Berlinski -
The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.
-- David Hockney -
The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.
-- David Knopfler -
The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.
-- David Mumford -
Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen.
-- Dick Cavett -
I never keep a scorecard or the batting averages. I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head.
-- Dizzy Dean -
Bayesian statistics is difficult in the sense that thinking is difficult.
-- Don Berry -
In Our Underachieving Colleges, [Derek] Bok acts as both diagnostician and healer, wielding social-science statistics and professional studies to trace the etiology of today's illnesses and to recommend palliative treatments for what he has discovered.
-- Donald Kagan -
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
-- Donald Knuth -
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
-- Douglas Adams -
GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions.
-- Douglas Gwyn -
Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.
-- Edgar Fiedler -
Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.
-- Edgar Rice Burroughs -
Even theories must have foundations.
-- Edgar Rice Burroughs -
Could it be that there were other things more desirable than cold logic and undefiled brain power?
-- Edgar Rice Burroughs -
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 -
Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.
-- Edmond de Goncourt -
Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have one answer.
-- Edmund Berkeley -
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
-- Edmund Burke -
The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.
-- Edward Gibbon -
The testament of science is so continually in a flux that the heresy of yesterday is the gospel of today and the fundamentalism of tomorrow.
-- Edward Kasner -
Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.
-- Edward Kasner -
The Mean Value Theorem is the midwife of calculus - not very important or glamorous by itself, but often helping to deliver other theorems that are of major significance.
-- Edward Mills Purcell -
If the statistics are boring, you've got the wrong numbers.
-- Edward Tufte -
What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!
-- Edwin Balmer -
It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with "randomness". Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information.
-- Edwin Thompson Jaynes -
Statistics in the hands of activists have power.
-- Ela Bhatt -
You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.
-- Elias Canetti -
He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?
-- Elias Canetti -
Since when was genius found respectable?
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning -
She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
-- Ellen Goodman -
Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.
-- Enrico Fermi -
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
-- Eric Temple Bell -
Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
-- Eric Temple Bell -
We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.
-- Evan Davis -
I know my statistics have not been the same as in other years but I'm fighting to get back to those statistics,
-- Fernando Torres -
I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.
-- Fred Hoyle -
It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.
-- Frederick Mosteller -
No one can tell time except approximately, time never stands still to be named.
-- Fredric Brown -
In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.
-- Friedrich Engels -
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
-- Galileo Galilei -
The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.
-- Galileo Galilei -
Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.
-- George Berkeley -
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.
-- George Canning -
Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.
-- George E. P. Box -
...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
