Quotes about Statistics

On April 30, 1991 - on that one day - 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.
"No, it's easy," she said. "Lots and lots of dots, in blue water."

First class of the year, Mrs. Voight [a biology teacher I had in the eighth grade, another dutiful demystifier, inveterate empiricist, and wearer of sensible shoes] announced, in a smug tone of voice striving for the matter-of-fact, that a human being was nothing more than a collection of chemicals that could be had from a biological supply company for approximately four dollars.  Why so cheap?  Because we were 95 percent water, with the rest consisting of relatively common forms of carbon.  I knew that day that, even if Mrs. Voight was right, she wsa not going to teach me anuthing I needed to know.
Everything that lives is 95 percent water.  Genius is 95 percent perspiration, 5 percent inspiration.  Success is 95 percent hard work.  Okay, I get it, but what about that 5 percent?  Tell me watermelon is 99 percent water and you still haven't told me anything interesting - like, what about the 1 percent?  Because chances are that's where you're going to find the watermelon…
I've had occasion to observe something else in good gardeners, a certain touch, an empathy for their plants, a sense of their soil more subtle and complete than any lab report's.  There are things they know I can't find in books.  It's the difference between the well-trained musician and the maestro, the water and the watermelon.  It's that unaccountable 5 percent.

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong.  The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right...  Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: 'What does his voice sound like?' 'What games does he like best?' 'Does he collect butterflies?' They ask: 'How old is he?' 'How many brothers does he have?' 'How much does he weigh?' 'How much money does his father make?' Only then do they think they know him.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

Constantly reminding a man of the favors he has received from you almost cancels the debt. The care of the statistics should be his privilege; you are usurping his prerogative when you recall them.

Wouldn't it be terrible if I quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol.

It is now beyond any doubt that cigarettes are the biggest cause of statistics.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is one of the more insidious statistics developed by our government because it directs the hostility of the inflation-weary public toward business and the marketplace instead of toward the cause: government mismanagement of currency and credit. . . . Real prices are not going up! The value of currency is going down.

Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.

All great questions of politics and economics come down in the last analysis to the decisions and actions of individual men and women. They are questions of human relations, and we ought always to think about them in terms of men and women-the individual human beings who are involved in them. If we can get human relations on a proper basis, the statistics, finance and all other complicated technical aspects of these questions will be easier to solve.

42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

In baseball we keep an accurate record of the hits, runs, and errors of each individual player. Life is also a great game, and in life the statistics are much more important than they are in a ball game. One of our human weaknesses in life is that when we are losing the game, we don't always like to keep track of the score. Certainly we are not very enthusiastic about putting the errors down on the paper, and most people don't even know what their individual batting average is. This makes our success much more difficult both to figure out and to attain . . . we cannot separate our success from our statistics. If each day we could see what God writes in his book about our works for that day, it would certainly motivate us to make better scores.

[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics.

Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than on all other days of the year put together. This proves, by the numbers left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

I spent twenty-two seasons playing professional baseball. Naturally, success in that field is measured by batting averages, number of home runs and RBIs, fielding averages, ERAs and other statistics. Fame, notoriety and the bright lights fade quickly. To me, true success in life would be to develop both physically and spiritually to our fullest and to endure to the end!

Then we lost a child, there was that incident, a four year-old little girl. It had a profound effect on me and on Barbara. You know, . . . when you lose a child some families go apart. There's a common wisdom that the loss of a loved one for parents divides them later on. People cite divorce statistics. In our case it was just the other way around. And our family has been close, close, close. And Barbara and I have been married for over 50 years, and I think that horrible incident drew us even closer together.

General Turgidson rants about the tremendous 'overkill' potential of the nuclear offensive while minimizing the Soviet retaliatory counter-attack casualty statistics: "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks."

Of Florence Nightingale: Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion. For her Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed - and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief - that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator - to say nothing of the politician - too often failed for want of this knowledge. Nay, she went further; she held that the universe - including human communities - was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was man's business to endeavor to understand this plan and guide his actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty.

The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up. The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field. The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon of this field.)