309 Quotes About Statistics

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.

Temu, kto szukając przyczyny, nie godzi się z żadną hipotezą rozmysłu, ani w jej postaci opatrznościowej, ani diabelskiej, pozostaje tylko racjonalny surogat demonologii – statystyka.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment.Manicheism is the irreconcilable antagonism between two forces. Morality is merely the opposition of two values. In the order of values, there is always a possibility of reconciliation. The disorder of forces is irreconcilable.

There are many people with an agenda out there, and they will ruthlessly torture statistics until they get the answer they want out of them.

Fire, knives, automobiles, hair removal cream. Each of these things serves an important purpose. Each one makes our lives better. And each one can cause some serious problems when abused. Now you can add statistics to that list.

You’ll also be pleased to know that no resident has been eaten in their sleep here for almost thirty-seven years.

One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to “prove it”—which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite

The finest studies are like the finest of anything else: They cost big bucks.

Longitudinal data sets are the research equivalent of a Ferrari. Not surprisingly, we can't always have the Ferrari. The research equivalent of a Toyota is a cross-sectional data set.