Data Quotes - Page 28

• Birth order effects are like those things that you think you see out of the corner of your eye but that disappear when you look at them closely. They do keep turning up but only because people keep looking for them and keep analyzing and reanalyzing their data until they find them.

  Judith Rich Harris

  Eye, Thinking, Order

  Judith Rich Harris (2009). “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• It is the special privilege of the fine artist to reveal immediate data with a clarity, intensity and purity that promotes them to a special degree of reality.

  Alton Tobey

  Artist, Reality, Special

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• When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

  Elif Batuman

  Girl, Book, Reading

  "The Rumpus Interview With Elif Batuman". Interview with Sean Carman, therumpus.net. April 25, 2012.

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• Ultimately, thinking is a very inefficient method of processing data.

  Frederick Lenz

  Thinking, Method, Processing

  Frederick Lenz (1994). “Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap”, Interglobal Seminars

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• If we gather more and more data and establish more and more associations, however, we will not finally find that we know something. We will simply end up having more and more data and larger sets of correlations.

  Kenneth Waltz

  Association, Ends, Correlation

  Kenneth N. Waltz (2010). “Theory of International Politics”, p.4, Waveland Press

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• The Europeans have lots of data on the use of adjuvanted flu vaccine in the elderly, but I dont think anybody has really good data on adjuvants in children.

  Anthony S. Fauci

  Children, Thinking, Flu Vaccine

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• The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

  Peter Drucker

  Computer, Moron, Handle

  Peter F. Drucker (2009). “The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done”, p.16, Harper Collins

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• The four most dangerous words in finance are 'this time is different.' Thanks to this masterpiece by Carmen Reinhart at the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, no one can doubt this again. . . . The authors have put an immense amount of work into collecting the data financial institutions needed if they were to have any chance of making quantitative risk management work.

  Martin Wolf

  Risk, Doubt, Different

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• Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Views, Turns, Extremes

  Benjamin Disraeli (1847). “Works”, p.173

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• The average person's short-term memory can hold only five to seven bits of data at any one moment. If you put more items in, others fall out. The older you are, the more you have crammed into those memory circuits. Twenty-five-year-olds can remember things because they still have empty space. Some of us take our children to the supermarket in the hope they will remember why we are there.

  Jennifer James

  Children, Memories, Fall

  Jennifer James (2012). “Thinking In The Future Tense”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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• Cats vary so widely that all data is meaningless and the professional classifiers gnash their teeth trying to come up with even a single fact common to all.

  Barbara Holland

  Cat, Trying, Teeth

  Barbara Holland (1994). “Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives”, Ivy Books

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• Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

  Florence Nightingale

  Science, Average, Minutes

  Florence Nightingale (1859). “Notes on Nursing: What it Is, and what it is Not”, p.69

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• How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Mean, Technology, Thinking

  Elizabeth Janeway (1987). “Improper behavior”, William Morrow

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• Let's say tomorrow that there was a president, that we elected a president that eliminated the bulk collection of data. Let's just say it happened. What do you think would happen? People are like 'the sky would fall. We would be overrun with jihadists.' Maybe we could rely on the Constitution. Maybe we could get warrants. ... If you make the warrant specific, there's no limit to what you can get through a warrant.

  Rand Paul

  Fall, Thinking, Nsa

  "Rand Paul's NSA Filibuster: His Notable Quotes" by Andrew Desiderio, www.realclearpolitics.com. May 21, 2015.

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• US intelligence agencies will only use such data to meet specific security requirements: counterintelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation, cybersecurity, force protection for our troops and allies, and combating transnational crime, including sanctions evasion.

  Barack Obama

  Agency, Nsa, Allies

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• Artists will come into my office and say, "I just came from another label and they said you're research guys, you're data guys." I don't know what that means. Everybody who says that is being naive.

  Monte Lipman

  Mean, Artist, Office

  "Corner Office: Republic Records Honchos Monte & Avery Lipman Discuss Jennifer Lawrence's 'Hunger Games' Smash and Defend 'The Voice'". Interview with Andrew Hampp, www.billboard.com. December 15, 2014.

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• People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

  Margaret Millar

  Ideas, People, Statistics

  Margaret Millar (2016). “A Stranger in My Grave”, p.116, Soho Press

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• If truth can be found in any sublunary science, numbers will produce it, for to that at last almost all other sciences refer for confirmation.

  Hester Lynch Piozzi

  Numbers, Lasts, Confirmation

  Samuel Johnson (écrivain), Hester Lynch Piozzi (1788). “Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson LL.D., to which are Added Some Poems Never Before Printed”, p.336

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• Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

  Djuna Barnes

  Age, Causes, Necks

  Djuna Barnes, Thomas Stearns Eliot (2006). “Nightwood”, p.20, New Directions Publishing

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• For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they've never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foreign correspondents, neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don't seem to read each other's work. That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Country, Writing, Two

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• many rules could be made for the giving of orders. Don't preach when you give orders. Don't discuss matters already settled unless you have fresh data. Make your direction so specific that there will be no question whether they have been obeyed or not. Find out how to give directions and yet to allow people opportunity for independent thinking, for initiative. And so on and so on. Order-giving requires just as much study and just as much training as any other skill we wish to acquire.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Leadership, Independent, Opportunity

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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, Numbers, Doubt

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

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• Even the new feminist research on sex-role socialization and sex differences has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of creating a new set of stereotypes about what women feel and how women behave. Despite the large amount of overlap between the sexes in most research, the tendency to label and polarize and thus to exaggerate differences remains in much reporting of data, which may, for example, report the mean scores of male and female populations but not the degree of overlap.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Sex, Mean, Differences

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• things in this world are very roughly averaged; and although averaging is a useful, rapid way of dispatching business, it does undoubtedly waste a great deal which is too good for wasting.

  Vernon Lee

  Doe, World, Way

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• There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Focus, Three

  "Diary" by Rebecca Solnit, www.lrb.co.uk. August 29, 2013.

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