Best 8 quotes of Darrell Huff on MyQuotes

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's 'big lie'; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it.

Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.

Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers brings about a suspension of common sense.