Statistics Quotes - Page 28

• Extreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it's an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense.

  Christopher McDougall

  Spring, Common Sense, Psychology

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• Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps.

  Roger Angell

  Sports, Baseball, Slumps

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• Statistics vary, but in less than seven years there won't be a single cell left in any of our bodies that's the same as it is today. This means that any human being who 'wants' to change is like a mountain river wanting to reach the valley floor. It's a done deal; that's what mountain rivers do, and 'changing' should be our first nature.

  Guy Finley

  Mean, Cells, Years

  "Fear and the ‘Anti-Change Factor’" by Guy Finley, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 10, 2012.

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• Robert Kennedy identified with people, not data, or institutions, or theories. Poverty was a specific black face for him, not a manila folder full of statistics.

  Jack Newfield

  Adversity, Data, People

  Jack Newfield (2009). “RFK: A Memoir”, p.48, Nation Books

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• Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Real, Men

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• [Statistics] Fiction in its most uninteresting form.

  Evan Esar

  Science, Technology, Fiction

  Esar's Comic Dictionary

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• [Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

  Evan Esar

  Science, Technology, Prove

  Esar's Comic Dictionary

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• All statements are true, if you are free to redefine their terms.

  Thomas Sowell

  Science, Term, Ifs

  Thomas Sowell (1995). “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, p.102, Basic Books

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• Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

  Thomas Sowell

  Science, Disaster, Shows

  Thomas Sowell (1995). “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, p.102, Basic Books

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• I fancy you give me credit for being a more systematic sort of cove than I really am in the matter of limits of significance. What would actually happen would be that I should make out Pt (normal) and say to myself that would be about 50:1; pretty good but as it may not be normal we'd best not be too certain, or 100:1; even allowing that it may not be normal it seems good enough and whether one would be content with that or would require further work would depend on the importance of the conclusion and the difficulty of obtaining suitable experience.

  William Sealy Gosset

  Science, Giving, Would Be

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• I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.

  Mark Twain

  Science, Men, Prove

  Mark Twain (1984). “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims and other salutary platform opinions”, Harpercollins

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• Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic

  Robert Kennedy

  Science, Men, Murder

  Robert F. Kennedy (1964). “Rights for Americans: the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy”

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• Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.

  Thomas Sowell

  Science, Years, Variables

  Thomas Sowell (1995). “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, p.102, Basic Books

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• Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Wise, Science, Important

  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays Chartism, II

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• In our society competitive capitalism has put family life and working life on a collision course.In Canada statistics show that over 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled and the sick falls on women most of whom receive no pay for these very essential tasks.Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of capitalism, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and thus increase the gap between them.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Children, Fall, Caring

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• Statistics have proven that the surest way to get anything out of the public mind and never hear of it again is to have a Senate committee appointed to look into it.

  Will Rogers

  Mind, Looks, Way

  Will Rogers, James Smallwood, Steven K. Gragert (1980). “Will Rogers' Weekly Articles: The Harding”

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• America already holds the record for freak movements. Now we have a new one. It's called "Restoring Confidence." Rich men who never had a mission in life outside of watching a stock ticker are working day and night "restoring confidence." Writers are working night shifts, speakers' tables are littered up, ministers are preaching statistics, all on "restoring confidence."

  Will Rogers

  Business, Night, Men

  Will Rogers (1978). “Will Rogers' Daily Telegrams: The Coolidge years, 1926-1929”, Will Rogers Heritage Trust

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• Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.

  Clarence Darrow

  Class, Poverty, Causes

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• The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. . . . The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States. . . . We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us.

  Mary Elizabeth Lease

  Country, Children, Home

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• Quite often, most of us are defined first by our vital statistics - our sex, our height, our weight, the colour of our eyes and then we're defined by our job.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Jobs, Sex, Eye

  "Archipelago - Tom Hiddleston interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

  Ronald Fisher

  Data, Issues, Tasks

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• It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

  Rollo May

  Running, Sex, Ironic

  Rollo May (1969). “Love and will”

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• We are now considering legislation based on statistics that include name-calling at public rallies as crimes. Are we going on to the school yards of this country and when two kids get angry with each other and call each other names -- what are we going to do, cart them over to the reformatory or add them to the list of 'hate crimes' perpetrators? This is ridiculous.

  Jesse Helms

  Country, Hate, School

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• Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

  Benjamin Graham

  Raw Materials, Causes, Prime

  "Storage and Stability". Book by Benjamin Graham, Part II, Chapter VI, The Question of Price Stability, p. 85, 1937.

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• Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.

  Bill Gates

  Children, Sibling, People

  "Bill Gates: ‘Death is something we really understand extremely well’". Interview with Ezra Klein, www.washingtonpost.com. May 17, 2013.

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