Statistics Quotes

"You can't fix by analysis what you bungled by design."

Light, Singer and Willett, page v

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"Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on
unexpected values."

John Tukey

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"Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for 
efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write."
                                                      
H.G.Wells

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"If you need statistics to prove it, it isn't true."

One of Barbara Doyle's Professors

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"Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the
quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death"

Hilaire Belloc

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"Facts speak louder than statistics"

Mr. Justice Streatfield (1950)

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"If all the statisticians in the world were laid head 
to toe, they wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion"

Anon., after comment on economists by G. B. Shaw

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"You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs
while they still have the power to heal."
               
Armand Trousseau, 19 Century French physician 

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"An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more
than an exact answer to an approximate problem."
                                        
John Tukey 

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"Every third person in Israel saw 1.8 public theater shows last year."

Newspaper headline posted on Maya Bar Hillel's board.

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"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the
better."
					
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece."
				
Miguel de Cervantes from Don Quixote
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"The organized charity, scrimped and iced,
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."

John Boyle O'Reilly

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"The most important questions of life are, for the most part,
really only problems of probability."
			
Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace

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"Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book."
                        
Isaiah, XXX 8

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"God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice 
where they cannot be seen."

Stephen William Hawking

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"Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
 Or quizzes upon world affairs,
 Nor with compliance
 Take any test.
 Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit
 A social science."

W. H. Auden

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"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts--for support
rather than illumination."
					
Andrew Lang

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"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better
experiment."
					
Lord Ernest Rutherford

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"[Statistics 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."
					
Sir Francis Galton

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"A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save
himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

Thomas Carlyle

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"Statistics are the heart of democracy."  Simeon Strunsky

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"Statistics are no substitute for judgment."  Henry Clay

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"The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison
of its predictions with experience."

Milton Friedman

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"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."  

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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"If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself."

Ghandi 

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"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to
interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical
construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations,
describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical
construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work"

John Von Neumann

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"Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds-and
fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal."  

Cassius J. Keyser

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"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex
facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it."

A. N. Whitehead