Statistician Quotes - Page 2

• It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Intelligent, Intelligence, Statistics

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• The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

  W. Edwards Deming

  Statistics, Action, Predictions

  Journal of the American Statistical Association Quoted in W.A. Wallis' The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945 Volume 75, Number 370, June 19 (p. 321)

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• He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Love, Math, Reality

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• Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

  Steven Pinker

  Numbers, People, World

  "Proud atheists". Salon Interview, www.salon.com. October 15, 2007.

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• It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.

  Frederick Mosteller

  Lying, Statistics, Easy

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• Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.

  Winston Churchill

  Fake, Statistics, Analytics

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• Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

  Nate Silver

  Data, Data Science, Scientist

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• All generalizations are false, including this one.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Truth, Inspirational Life

  Attributed in "A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense" by Mark Twain, Seven Stories Press, (p. 61), January 4, 2011.

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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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• The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.

  Udny Yule

  Science, Opportunity, Data

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• Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

  John von Neumann

  Witty, Powerful, Humorous

  "Various techniques used in connection with random digits" by John von Neumann in "Monte Carlo Method" edited by A.S. Householder, G.E. Forsythe and H.H. Germond, 1951.

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• 61% of graduating teens have had sex, 37% will eventually have sex, and 2% become statisticians.

  Jon Stewart

  Sex, Teens, Graduates

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• It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Education, Mistake, Math

  "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)

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• Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.

  Bradley Efron

  Science, Statistics, Probability

  "'The Role of Statistics in the Data Revolution?'. International Statistical Review 69: 5-10" by Jerome H. Friedman, April 2001.

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• This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?

  Thomas Pynchon

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• Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

  John Tukey

  Focus, Statistics, Unexpected

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• We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.

  Michael Lewis

  Hands, Stories, Facts

  Source: www.cbc.ca

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• The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Men, Thinking

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• The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

  John Tukey

  Data, Desire, Body

  "Sunset Salvo" by John Tukey in The American Statistician, Volume 40, No. 1 (pp. 72-76), www.jstor.org. February 1986.

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Science, Objectivity, Victory

  The Silence of the Sea On Statistics (p. 173)

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• If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

  Ernest Rutherford

  Math, Science, Needs

  Quoted in N.T. Bailey's The Mathematical Approach to Biology and Medicine Chapter 2 (p. 23)

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• The average family exists only on paper and its average budget is a fiction, invented by statisticians for the convenience of statisticians.

  Sylvia Porter

  Family, Money, Average

  Sylvia Porter (1976). “Money”

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

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Funny, Witty, Truth

  Attributed to Disraeli by Mark Twain in his 'Autobiography' (1924) vol. 1, p. 246

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• If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.

  Ernest Rutherford

  Design, Needs, Funny Science

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• Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.

  George E. P. Box

  Believe, Engineering, Branches

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