Statistics Quotes

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.

For me, unemployment and poverty in the Greater Montreal area is not mainly a problem of structure, or design, or statistics. It is a profoundly human situation.

If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

Statistics is the grammar of science.

The light of faith makes us see what we believe.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.

You see, but you do not observe.

Inability is often the mother of restriction, and restriction is the great mother of inventive performance.

The customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so

Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.

According to the statistics, a man eats a prune every twenty seconds. I don't know who this fellow is, but I know where to find him.

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

According to statistics, one person out of five is disturbed. If there are four people around you who seem normal, that's not good.

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.

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

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Whenever you can, count.

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind.