Quotes on Statistics

We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.

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

It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.

A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

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

Nature has neither kernel Nor shell

It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.

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

As a rule, he or she who has the most information will have the greatest success in life.

Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws. The legislator must formulate in his statutes not only the national will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by statistics.

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.

Probability is the very guide of life.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way.

When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain.

What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the World.

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

It is a precarious undertaking to say anything reliable about aims and intentions.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.