Quotes on Statistics

Network. Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

In real life there is no such person as the average man.

Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.

The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain.

It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. But I am sure that figures show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed not counted.

That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.

It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.

Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.

Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times.

I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.

It has long been recognized by public men of all kinds. . . that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics.

Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited.

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.