Median Quotes

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing. ~ Marc Andreessen

The median GPA and LSAT percentile for students of the country's elite law schools were 3.8 and 98 respectively. At the time fewer than 20 black law students in the entire country met those standards. ~ Lino Graglia

There is a small minority of well-educated people with relatively sensible views on economics, and an extremely tiny minority of economists with highly sensible views. Then there's everybody else ... To win, a politician needs to please the median voter. It makes little difference if a few thousand economists think you a fool. ~ Bryan Caplan

I rolled the second car that I ever owned, a Toyota 4 Runner. This was winter in Colorado, two weeks before the 2002 Olympic trials. I was driving in the outside lane, and my rear tire caught some black ice, and we totally turned sideways to the point where we were heading right toward the median. ~ Apolo Ohno

Over the past decade, child care costs have risen twice as fast as the median income of families with children. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

The median-aged CNN viewer is 60. For Fox, it's 68. ~ Anonymous

The competitive landscape of hedge funds is rapidly changing, as hundreds of funds are opened and closed every year. For example, Pensions & Investments reported that 784 new funds were started in 2009, while 1,023 existing funds were closed. Amazingly, the median life of a hedge fund is only 31 months. Fewer than 15 percent of hedge funds last longer than six years, and 60 percent of them disappear in less than three years.[3] ~ Gordon Murray

I've learned through a series of trials and errors that the median space is actually what's missing in our daily walk. ~ Carlos Wallace

This is a critical time in American history. [Donald's Trump] strength is willingness to stand up to political conventions, take on Republican and Democrat leaders, and, in effect, do so in defense of the legitimate interest of people who make less than median income in America, is the key to victory. ~ Jeff Sessions

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort. ~ Alain De Botton

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort.

Then there are communities - far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage - whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christia ~ Alain De Botton

And wages - we'll see the end of this decline we're having. The median income in America is down 10% in just the last four years. That's got to stop. We've got to start seeing rising wages and job growth. ~ Mitt Romney

Moderation: a median with no means, praised by those with no misfortunes, practiced by those with no merits. ~ Bauvard

Most Americans are on a downward escalator. Median wage in the United States, adjusted for inflation, keeps on dropping. ~ Robert Reich

In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving in a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.

Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest.

JACKSONVILLE
FLA OR BUST

I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust.

The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew no ~ Charles Portis

The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services. ~ Alan Bock

effect the exchange of labor and services by means of an exchange of heartbeats. estimate every task in terms of heartbeats-the monetary unit of the future, in which all individuals are equally wealthy. take 365 times 317 as the median number of heartbeats in any twenty-four-hour period. ~ Velimir Khlebnikov

In many of our [online] courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes - which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students. ~ Daphne Koller

The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56 ~ Christopher L. Hayes

Median real income is below its level of twenty-five years ago. For males, median real income is below what it was in 1968. ~ Noam Chomsky

My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word "average" having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is the average you still don't know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is- mean, median, or mode. ~ Darrell Huff

nearly half of all members of Congress have a net worth north of a million dollars, compared to just one in twenty-two households nationwide.26 Between 1984 and 2009, while the median net worth of American households remained essentially unchanged, the median net worth of members of the House of Representatives rose by 260 percent. Not only did the rich get richer, so did Congress. While ~ Christopher L. Hayes

The median time it took for men to get an EKG was 15 minutes, compared
to 21 minutes for women; the gender gap was 28 compared to 36 minutes
for fibrinolytic therapy to break up a clot and 93 compared to 106 minutes
to implant a coronary stent. ~ Maya Dusenbery

The reported numbers of MPD alter personality states are given great play by critics. As usual, these critics rarely consult the research. Although cases with dozens or scores of alters have been reported, the mode is 3 and the median typically 8-10 (see, e.g., Putnam et al., 1986; Coons et al., 1988; Ross, Norton, and Wozney, 1989f; Kluft, 1991). ~ Frank W. Putnam

If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis. ~ Tyler Cowen

Once a price move exceeds its median historical age, any method you use to analyze the market, whether it be fundamental or technical, is likely to be far more accurate. For example, if a chartist interprets a particular pattern as a top formation, but the market is only up 10% from the last low, the odds are high that the projection will be incorrect. However, if the market is up 25% to 30%, then the same type of formation should be given a great deal more weight. ~ Victor Sperandeo

In the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of twenty years. ~ Steven Pinker

I just wish that Statistics was as easy as arranging numbers in chronological order, finding the median, lower and upper quartiles, and placing them on a Box and whisker's chart ~ Charmaine J Forde

The median startup is a business that's capitalized with about $25,000. The financing of that business comes from the entrepreneur's savings. The business is a retail or personal service business, a hair salon or a clothing store, that kind of thing. ~ Scott Shane

Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated. ~ Nicholas Kristof

It is true that rich people can spend more money than middle class people, but there's this upper limit on what we can spend. I drive a very nice car, but it's only one car. I don't own a thousand, even though I earn a thousand times the median wage. I have a few jackets, not a few thousand. ~ Nick Hanauer

It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, "Chip, I'm not sleeping in this house."

We were broke. We couldn't go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents' doors at that time of night.

That's when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip's parents' old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. "Let's get in the RV. We'll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we'll have AC," I said.
As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, "I know where we can go." It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery.
"Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?" I asked him.
"We're not going to the cemetery," Chip said. "It's just next to a cemetery. There's an RV park back here."
"Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?"
"Oh, quit it. You're going to love it once I get this AC fired up."
Chip decided to go flying through the median between the two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would've both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle.
"What was that?!"
"I ~ Joanna Gaines

Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a 'nobler', more 'naturally' aristocratic dimensions than the 'coarse' and 'bestial' Hutus. On the 'nasal index' for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose. ~ Philip Gourevitch

It was an alien place, as much inhuman as it was ungodly. There was no life in this place. It was a different world altogether.
This world was dead. ~ Angelo Tsanatelis

There also wasn't one single bit of grass or dirt outside the airport. Even the median strip was a concrete sidewalk. Where did Atlanta's pet travelers pee? Maybe city dogs just learned to use the sidewalk. We kept walking. It looked like if we crossed the road that all the cars used to get onto the highway, we might come to a planted-up area, but we also might get killed.
Finally, I just lifted Cannoli up and plopped her down on a great big ashtray built into the top of the trash barrel. "Good thing you're not a German shepherd," I said. ~ Claire Cook

The costs of placing a four-year-old and an infant in child care exceed annual median rent payments in every state. Despite ~ Sheryl Sandberg

It wasn't hard to find such data. For example, between 1948 and 1954, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered theymselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was revisited in 1989, and this time it wasn't 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent of boys and 77 percent of girls. Psychologists have a thing called the narcissism test. They read people statements and ask if the statements apply to them. Statements such as "I like to be the center of attention ... I show off if I get the chance because I am extraordinary ... Somebody should write a biography about me." The median narcissism score has risen 30 percent in the last two decades. Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago.4 The largest gains have been in the number of people who agree with the statements "I am an extraordinary person" and "I like to look at my body. ~ David Brooks

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world's richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV's dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabba ~ Matt Ridley

We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? ~ Nick Hanauer

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation. ~ Robert Reich

Such was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude." Dieneces, not at all frightened at these words, but making light of the Median numbers, answered "Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade. ~ Herodotus

All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers' costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers' take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy. ~ Charlie Munger

The upshot is that to send its children to a school of even average quality, a family must outbid half of other similar families who are pursuing the same goal. And that's become dramatically more expensive because of the growth in median house size, which was in turn caused by higher spending at the top. ~ Bob Frank

Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything. ~ Norman Rush

Union members not only earn higher median wages; they are more likely to have paid sick leave, short-term disability, and employer-provided child care. Giving people a voice at work - the ability to organize and negotiate for their fair share of the value they helped create - is absolutely essential to a growing, vibrant middle class. ~ Thomas Perez

My main source for faith-based stuff is mostly the Bible, and a childhood with a much, much higher-than-median exposure to theological thought. ~ Jim Butcher

The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," says Zelman. "But the problem wasn't just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one. ~ Michael Lewis