Statistical Quotes

Quotation	Author
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.	Disraeli
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.	H. G. Wells
I have a great subject (statistics) to write upon, but feel keenly my literary incapacity to make it easily intelligible without sacrificing accuracy and thoroughness.	Sir Francis Galton
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty two miles.  That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.  Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just over a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.  And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.  There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.	Mark Twain
If the results disagree with informed opinion, do not admit a simple logical interpretation, and do not show up clearly in a graphical presentation, they are probably wrong.  There is no magic about numerical methods, and many ways in which they can break down.  They are a valuable aid to the interpretation of data, not sausage machines automatically transforming bodies of numbers into packets of scientific fact.	F. H. C. Marriott
Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners.	G. O. Ashley
Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.	Fletcher Knebel
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up, and the kind you make up.	Rex Stout
Data are the unorganized sludge of the information age.	Robert Lucky Former director of AT&T Bell Labs, paraphrased from The Monster Under the Bed by Stan Davis and Jim Botkin, A Touchstone book, published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995, 189pp.