Best 232 quotes in «statistics quotes» category

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

If I were sitting down with George Steinbrenner (to discuss a salary) and based on what Dave Winfield got for his statistics, I'd have to say, 'George, you and I are about to become partners.'

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

If the statistics are boring, you've got the wrong numbers.

If they would only do as he did and publish posthumously we should all be saved a lot of trouble.

In Our Underachieving Colleges, [Derek] Bok acts as both diagnostician and healer, wielding social-science statistics and professional studies to trace the etiology of today's illnesses and to recommend palliative treatments for what he has discovered.

If you are doing things the same way as two years ago, you are almost certainly doing them wrong.

I learned many years ago never to waste time trying to convince my colleagues.

I'm doing everything that I can, working with experts, really studying the statistics to figure out a way we can make it cool or normal to be kind and loving.

In the patient who succumbed, the cause of death was evidently something which was not found in the patient who recovered; this something we must determine, and then we can act on the phenomena or recognize and foresee them accurately. But not by statistics shall we succeed in this; never have statistics taught anything, and never can they teach anything about the nature of the phenomenon.

Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century.

In the realm of ideas, of mental objects, those ideas whose properties are reproducible are called mathematical objects, and the study of mental objects with reproducible properties is called mathematics.

In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

I thought the divorce statistics would never apply to me. I was beyond heartbroken when they did. But I got up and got on with it. I also kept my belief in marriage.

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.

I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.

Is it in the UK's interests to leave the EU? It depends on your values. The answer can't be read off of GDP statistics under various scenarios or some measures of global influence.

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.

I've taught statistics, math courses and what I've found is that often if you teach them algebraically the formulas, you'll have one group of kids doing well.

I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics.

Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.

I would not go so far as to say that vaccination has never saved a person from smallpox. It is a matter of record that thousands of the victims of this superstitious rite have been saved from smallpox by the immunizing potency of death. But it is a fact that the official statistics of England and Wales show unmistakably that, while vaccination has killed ten times more people than smallpox, there has been a decrease in smallpox concomitant with the decrease in vaccination. . . It might be appropriately asked, in the words of the Vaccination Inquirer

Man is a tool-making animal

Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.

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

Since when was genius found respectable?

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

People with fertility problems are not alone. It is a very very common problem for couples today. I've seen statistics that are just staggering.

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

Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away.

Statistics have proven that the surest way to get anything out of the public mind and never hear of it again is to have a Senate committee appointed to look into it.

Statistics indicate that the average American is a guy named Brian who lives in Ohio.

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

So strong is the power of superstition that even though we know that we have been reverencing a sham, yet still we hesitate to admit the validity of our new-found convictions.

Statistics are for losers.

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

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.

Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.

The calculus is the greatest aid we have to the application of physical truth in the broadest sense of the word.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.