Best 4 quotes in «statistic quotes» category

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.

The doctor asks the patient some form of the following: “So, what is wrong?” (or, in my case, my doc always asks “So, what are your concerns?”). The doctor listens for an average of 9 seconds, then intervenes with a prognosis. The amount of time the doctor is willing to listen before intervening has gone down over time, presumably as health insurers have pressured doctors to increase throughput and as they have greatly increased the amount of paperwork required of doctors. In other words, it is in the name of efficiency. The efficiency fairies are at work in the doctor’s office to eliminate all that wasteful time spent in creating a doctor-patient relationship.

The most important thing to know about statistics is that you don't have to be a statistic.

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)