Statistics Quotes - Page 29

• Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

  Jaron Lanier

  Perfection, Demand, Break

  "The New Humanists: Science at the Edge". Book edited by John Brockman, 2003.

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• A lot is said, by foreigners and the left, about America being a violent society. Yet if you subtract the crime statistics for its largest cities places that have been under the strict political control of so-called "progressives", sometimes for many generations what remains, the real America, is the most peaceful, productive, prosperous, and truly progressive civilization in all of human history.

  L. Neil Smith

  Real, Civilization, Cities

  "In Praise of Social Benefactors". The Libertarian Enterprise, www.ncc-1776.org. August 18, 2013.

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• I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).

  Lloyd deMause

  Years, Political, Ignorant

  Lloyd DeMause (1975). “The New Psychohistory”, New York : Psychohistory Press

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• It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Running, Simple, Law

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• Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever.
  Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.

  Florence Nightingale

  Expression, Law, Ideas

  Florence Nightingale, Michael D. Calabria, Janet A. Macrae (1994). “Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale: Selections and Commentaries”, p.41, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• Statistics are just people with the tears wiped off.

  Spencer Rascoff

  Wisdom, People, Tears

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• We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

  Virginia Woolf

  Years, Age, Taught

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own: And Three Guineas”, p.85, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Light, Dust, Sea

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• We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Change, Taken, Numbers

  Margaret J. Wheatley (1994). “Leadership and the new science: learning about organization from an orderly universe”, Berrett-Koehler Pub

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• We lisp in numbers, in the U.S. We are deluged by ample, often mysterious statistics. ... Like many in this country, I have come to regard statistics with doubt and merely as a hint of the probable shape of fact.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Country, Data, Numbers

  Martha Gellhorn (1988). “The View from the Ground”, p.280, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• Stories told around the water-cooler as well as statistics confirm that a man's competence is more likely to be presupposed, a woman's questioned.

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson

  Men, Water, Stories

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995). “Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership”, p.122, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure... and forget that there is a difference.

  Udny Yule

  Differences, Lust, Wish

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• ... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.

  Ronald Fisher

  Interpretation, Procedures, Experiments

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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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• You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs while they still have the power to heal.

  Armand Trousseau

  Drug, Patient, Should

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• Statistics are the heart of democracy.

  Simeon Strunsky

  Heart, Democracy

  Topics of the Times November 30, 1944

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• For me, unemployment and poverty in the Greater Montreal area is not mainly a problem of structure, or design, or statistics. It is a profoundly human situation.

  Kim Campbell

  Design, Unemployment, Poverty

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• Statistics say that I'm supposed to be in jail. And I'm not supposed to be alive.

  Tyler Perry

  Jail, Alive, Supposed To Be

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• Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

  Steven Pinker

  Memories, Psychology, Mind

  "Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace". Interview with John Naughton, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2011.

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• Americans pay up to 1,000 percent more to fill their prescriptions than consumers in other countries - that is an alarming statistic.

  Ken Salazar

  Country, Pay, Consumers

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• Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

  Marilyn vos Savant

  Support, Literature, Able

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• Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

  Will Self

  Past, Individuality, Madness

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• The Democrats' response throughout the healthcare debate? Give the people more statistics.

  Simon Sinek

  People, Giving, Healthcare

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• Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics.

  Paul Samuelson

  School, Men, Air

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• Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man.

  Wallace B. Smith

  Powerful, Math, Men

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