Quotes on Statistics

Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

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

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

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

Statistics are the lifeblood of baseball. In no other sport are so many available and studied so assiduously by participants and fans. Much of the game's appeal, as a conversation piece, lies in the opportunity the fan gets to back up opinions and arguments with convincing figures, and it is entirely possible that more American boys have mastered long division by dealing with batting averages than in any other way.

You try to be as original as you can be without thinking about statistics. You just go from the soul and from the heart.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

Zeno was concerned with three problems... These are the problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity.

God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

Among all of the mathematical disciplines the theory of differential equations is the most important... It furnishes the explanation of all those elementary manifestations of nature which involve time.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

I'm no different than others with cancer. I just happen to play professional baseball. I'm part of those statistics that cancer has touched as well.

When we hear (as we sometimes do) that (Russia's) economic output is about half the level of a decade ago or that real incomes have fallen sharply, it is worth recalling that economic statistics under the Soviet Union were hardly more reliable than any other official statements. Moreover, a country that produces what no one wants to buy, and whose workers receive wages that they cannot use to buy goods they want, is hardly in the best of economic health.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.

Example is always more efficacious than precept.

People must not attempt to impose their own 'truth' on others. The right to profess the truth must always be upheld, but not in a way that involves contempt for those who may think differently. Truth imposes itself solely by the force of its own truth.