Statistics Quotes

Big companies are often in the process of laying off workers. Small startup companies are the ones that are hiring. The statistics prove that's where job growth is going to occur. ~ Jerry Moran

No scientist is as model minded as is the statistician; in no other branch of science is the word model as often and consciously used as in statistics. ~ Hans Freudenthal

Before a girl falls in love, the only man who can talk to her about her vital statistics freely, is her Tailor. ~ Sneha Mehta

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion - we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. ~ Daniel Kahneman

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics. ~ Caitlin Moran

If statistical reality is the only one, then that is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgment and decision are not only superfluous but impossible. Then the individual is bound to be a function of statistics and hence a function of the State or whatever the abstract principle of order may be called. ~ C. G. Jung

As academics we have pretty good judgment about the quality of institutions that cannot simply be measured by counting the number of papers published or patents received. Outsiders who swoop in to count beans and make up lists based on statistics have little sense of what excellence is. ~ Henry Rosovsky

Considering the alternative ... it's not too bad at all. ~ Maurice Chevalier

Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on. ~ Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in as in their rectified version ~ George Orwell

Did you know that seventy-five to eighty percent of juvenile offenders can't read at grade level?"
"Really?" This was news to me.
"Your world becomes a much smaller place if you can't read. You have far fewer options. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one. If they want to know how big to build a prison,
all they have to do is look at the illiteracy statistics."
"They knew I was coming."
"You or someone like you."
"You knew it too, all those years ago, back in Quincy. That's why you tried to help me. Because you knew I was coming here."
"Here or someplace like here. ~ Carolee Dean

Coincidence", he finally said. "Statisticans looking for connections can always find odd coincidences and statistical anomalies, if they try hard enough. ~ Brandon Sanderson

My experience of working on this show, even though there is so much about sex and sexuality, and we find out a lot of facts and statistics that are very interesting, in their own right, I found that I started talking about relationships more, and the emotions, the difficulties and the challenges. So, I became far more open about that, which I think is probably an indication with the show itself. ~ Michael Sheen

I had been hearing on-the-ground buzz that white folks were moving to places like Bend, Oregon, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and St. George, Utah. That led me to discover through census data that these towns were already extremely white and they were becoming, in most cases, even whiter. Statistics could only tell me so much; in order to get to the spirit and essence of it, I had to immerse myself. ~ Richard Benjamin

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. ~ Lars Peter Hansen

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in business by being a conformist. ~ J. Paul Getty

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

Formatting is no substitute for writing. ~ Leslie Lamport

Since when was genius found respectable? ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The practising Bayesian is well advised to become friends with as many numerical analysts as possible. ~ Jim Berger

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

It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. ~ David Simon

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Doug, you have to prepare yourself. You have to prepare Sarah. It won't be long before they have some answers. You have to get ready, Doug.'Jesus, Pete,' yelled Doug. 'Don't you think I've fucking been ready every day for the last four months? Every hour of every day for the last four months? I can't breathe in without being ready. I know all those statistics. They quoted them at me when they wanted me to go home. If a kid isn't found within the first twenty-four hours there's a chance he will never be found alive. I know that, Pete. Don't you think I fucking know that? Every time that fucking phone rings I can see Sarah's heart hit her feet. We're ready, Pete. We've been ready since the day we lost him. We're ready but we will never be ready. There is no way to be ready for this. No way . . .'Doug had sunk into silence and all Pete had heard was his ragged desperate breathing on the other end of the phone. Finally he said, 'I can't tell her, Pete. I can't tell her until they know for sure. She's hanging on by a thread, Pete, and I can't lose her as well. Tell me when they know for sure and then I'll tell her.' His voice trailed off, all the anger leaving him exhausted and trembling. ~ Nicole Trope

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict. ~ Antony Beevor

There is a liberal bias. It's demonstrable. You look at some statistics. About 85 percent of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. There is a, particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias. ~ Evan Thomas

If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited. ~ Aristotle.

Fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness." Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: "The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

Most likely because the majority of the receptionists have gone home, to a sick partner according to statistics, in the country with the shortest working hours in the world, the biggest health budget and the highest proportion of sick leave. ~ Jo Nesbo

Statistic: the us bureau of missing persons reports
that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared
leaving no solid clues
nor traceonly
a space
in the lives of their friends. ~ Ishmael Reed

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

We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks' time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like in 10 or 20 years from now. ~ Peter Thiel

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

I really don't care much about baseball, or looking at ball games, major or minor. All my interest in baseball is in its statistics. ~ Ernest Lanigan

each day 14 children under the age of 19 are killed by guns ~ National Center For Health Statistics (U.S.) Staff

I am delighted to be part of this Women's Aid campaign - the statistics are frightening. I've spent time with the victims of these cowardly acts, and it's heartbreaking. Everyday women and children are being abused in their own homes. I am standing up and saying that I am a Real Man, and that violence against women and children has to end. ~ Gethin Jones

I have to absorb the new season like sunlight, letting it turn my winter skin pink and then brown. I must stuff myself with lore and statistics until my fingers ooze balm. ~ W.P. Kinsella

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. ~ Eric Temple Bell

Statistics or graphs,'" are not optimal to understand the 'experience of suffering.'" (qtd in Sutton 11) ~ Paul Farmer

Half of all kids in public education are below the poverty line. Two-thirds of the achievement gap comes from factors outside of school. Teachers influence about seven to ten percent of what happens in kids' lives. When you think about those statistics, you have to think about how to re-envision education so it's holistic and so we share responsibility. ~ Randi Weingarten

Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic. ~ Elias Canetti

And of course, Japan, with the highest suicide statistics in the world, a country with an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible, would provide the perfect last refuge for him. ~ Ian Fleming

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place. ~ Gunter Grass

Lack of interest in mission is not fundamentally caused by an absence of compassion or commitment, nor by lack of information or exhortation. And lack of interest in mission is not remedied by more shocking statistics, more gruesome stories or more emotionally manipulative commands to obedience. It is best remedied by intensifying peoples' passion for Christ, so that the passions of his heart become the passions that propel our hearts. ~ Tim A. Dearborn

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ~ Ronald A. Fisher

I never was brought into the league thinking as far as, you know, statistics, things like that. We were really brought into the league in a team concept. Everything was focused around winning. ~ Mark Messier

...Analyses of globalization may also include statistics on poverty and human development indicators such as health, life expectancy, education, and infant mortality. While such statistics are important and can provide powerful statements about reality, perspectives based mainly or exclusively on aggredate data remove us from the lives of real, embodied human beings. A shortcoming of these kinds of distant analyses is that they often miss or gloss over how peopple experience capitalist globalization in and on their bodies, and how embodied subjects in marginalized communities, both in the Global North and South, have challenged and resisted such powerful social forces (38). ~ Barbara Sutton

Who then will explain the explanation? ~ Lord Byron

The truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes, or under other horrific conditions and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children. And though at first glance that looks like a big number, 2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians. The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left. ~ Katie J. Davis

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it. ~ Quentin Crisp

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable? ~ Brian Kernighan

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 want to empasize that rape is about human beings, not statistics. ~ Janet Bode

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster. ~ Thomas Sowell

I've said many times that statistics reveal a surprising city: one that has more movie theaters than Paris, more abortions than London, more universities than New York. Where nighttime has become sparse, desolate, the kingdom of only a few. Where violence rules, corners us, silences us into a kind of autism. ~ Paco Ignacio Taibo II

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. ~ Mark Twain

There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics ... Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual couplings often has the feel of a statistical survey. ~ John Allen Paulos

Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. If somewhere among the world's six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof. But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors' prisons have vanished, and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing of Canada and Spain over flatfish. ~ Steven Pinker

I can buy baseball cards to view an entire career on the back of a little square of cardboard. But nobody sells major league father cards with key statistics on the back ("Had a great season in 2005: set career highs in unforced expressions of affection and averaged 87 minutes of quality time per day.") ~ John Ortberg Jr.

It has long been recognized by public men of all kinds ... that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics. ~ Hilaire Belloc

What makes him successful is the way that he analyzes information. He is not just hunting for patterns. Instead, Bob combines his knowledge of statistics with his knowledge of basketball in order to identify meaningful relationships in the data. ~ Nate Silver

Years ago a statistician might have claimed that statistics deals with the processing of data ... to-days statistician will be more likely to say that statistics is concerned with decision making in the face of uncertainty. ~ Herman Chernoff

Just then, Larry recalled a conversation he had with a friend in Ireland, about the situation in Nepal between the King and the Maoists. The friend was sided with the Maoists, which was more or less his political leanings in any case, and stated that at least they were trying to help the people. So Larry had remarked upon the rising death rate, and how the Maoists are just as brutal as the security forces, yet the friend simply shrugged and said you have to expect some collateral damage in a revolution.
Oh how he hates that phrase, as that makes it sound like the people's lives are meant to be expendable, something that a person's life should never be. Of course, it is very easy to disregard people you have never met, and who are certainly not your friends or family members. After all, in the eyes of an outsider, who is in no danger whatsoever, the people caught up in the situation are nothing more than simply statistics. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

The actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation. ~ Ronald Fisher

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. ~ Fletcher Knebel

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation. ~ Thomas Sowell

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

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten. ~ Thomas Sowell

Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies
in the laboratory. ~ Carl Sagan

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered? ~ Woody Allen

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom's apple pie. ~ Harry Reasoner

You may note the irony. In the context of the cab problem, the neglect of base-rate information is a cognitive flaw, a failure of Bayesian reasoning, and the reliance on causal base rates is desirable. Stereotyping the Green drivers improves the accuracy of judgment. In other contexts, however, such as hiring or profiling, there is a strong social norm against stereotyping, which is also embedded in the law. This is as it should be. In sensitive social contexts, we do not want to draw possibly erroneous conclusions about the individual from the statistics of the group. We consider it morally desirable for base rates to be treated as statistical facts about the group rather than as presumptive facts about individuals. In other words, we reject causal base rates. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story. ~ Daša Drndić

What makes a terrorist? Are the drivers primarily political or economic? Princeton economist Alan Krueger has made a great study of this question ... What Makes a Terrorist lacks a question mark. That's because Krueger, marshaling persuasive statistics and analysis, comes down firmly on the side of politics, noting most terrorists are middle-class and well-educated. ~ Thomas P.M. Barnett

I think the one thing that is abundantly clear from these statistics is that there are a whole lot of people in the world who think they are Christians but are not. ~ David Platt

[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing. ~ Iain M. Banks

Ida was clearly exasperated by the fact that despite the motives that accompanied the lynching statistics published year after year - which Ida included in nearly every article - "law-abiding and fair-minded people should so persistently shut their eyes to the facts." Ida continued, "This record, easily within the reach of every one who wants it," made it "inexcusable" for anyone not to debunk the presumption from the beginning. ~ Paula J. Giddings

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man. ~ Francis Galton

Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics. ~ Nicholson Baker

Ah, marriage. The kind of union we have affects our children infinitely more than the schools we put them in, the activities we sign them up for, or the church we take them to. Our kids are learning relational habits by osmosis, and statistics say they'll likely imitate what they witness at home. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Averages don't always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet. ~ Robert Reich

Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity. ~ George Berkeley

Every thought is an afterthought. ~ Hannah Arendt

Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more. ~ David Eagleman

Statistics cannot substitute for the human being before you; statistics embody averages, not individuals. ~ Jerome Groopman

Checquy statistics indicate that 15 percent of all men in hats are concealing horns. ~ Daniel O'Malley

Essentially, the frequentist approach toward statistics seeks to wash its hands of the reason that predictions most often go wrong: human error. ~ Nate Silver

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

There is a tendency in all of us to ask for better statistical performance. There is a tendency to impose quotas behind which usually lies imposition of pressure to achieve improved statistics. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah's ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world's population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That's kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God's math works!
Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don't have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).
pg 11 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

The bearings of this observation lays in the application of it. ~ Charles Dickens

He uses statistics like a drunk uses lamp-posts, more for support than illumination. ~ Romano Prodi

I never keep a scorecard or the batting averages. I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head. ~ Dizzy Dean

If you look at the statistics regarding Native Americans, you will see that most of the tribes since the 70s have improved their economic situation in some form. And this has been brought about by their aggressive assertion of their sovereign treaty rights. ~ Leonard Peltier

What nature hath joined together, multiple regression analysis cannot put asunder. ~ Richard E. Nisbett

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges