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. |