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<title>Statistics Quotes</title>

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<h1>Statistics Quotes</h1>

 

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  <li> "Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty."

 

John Finley

 

  <li> "Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly

      high degree of improbability."

 

R. A. Fisher

 

  <li> "... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must

      govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation."

 

R. A. Fisher

 

  <li> "Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any

      finite body of data contains only a limited amount of

      information on any point under examination; that this limit is

      set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be

      increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their

      statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact,

      is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available

      information on any particular issue."

 

R. A. Fisher

 

  <li> "The science of statistics is the chief instrumentality

      through which the progress of civilization is now measured, and

      by which its development hereafter will be largely controlled."

 

S. N. D. North

 

  <li> "While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is

      more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives."

 

Elizur Wright

     

  <li> "... the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is

possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment

may be said to exist only to give the facts a chance of disproving the

null hypothesis."

 

R. A. Fisher

 

  <li> "... a hypothesis test tells us whether the observed data are

consistent with the null hypothesis, and a confidence interval tells

us which hypotheses are consistent with the data."

 

William C. Blackwelder

 

  <li> "You can't fix by analysis what you bungled by design."

 

Light, Singer and Willett, page v

 

  <li> "Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on

unexpected values."

 

John Tukey

 

  <li> "Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for

efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write."

                                                      

H.G.Wells

 

  <li> "If you need statistics to prove it, it isn't true."

 

One of Barbara Doyle's Professors

 

  <li> "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the

quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death"

 

Hilaire Belloc

 

  <li> "Facts speak louder than statistics"

 

Mr. Justice Streatfield (1950)

 

  <li> "If all the statisticians in the world were laid head

to toe, they wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion"

 

Anon., after comment on economists by G. B. Shaw

 

  <li> "You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs

while they still have the power to heal."

              

Armand Trousseau, 19 Century French physician

 

  <li> "An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more

than an exact answer to an approximate problem."

                                       

John Tukey

 

  <li> "Every third person in Israel saw 1.8 public theater shows last year."

 

Newspaper headline posted on Maya Bar Hillel's board.

 

  <li> "All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the

better."

                                       

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

  <li> "By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece."

                                

Miguel de Cervantes from Don Quixote

 

  <li> "The organized charity, scrimped and iced,

In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."

 

John Boyle O'Reilly

 

  <li> "The most important questions of life are, for the most part,

really only problems of probability."

                       

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace

 

  <li> "Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book."

                       

Isaiah, XXX 8

 

  <li> "You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order

              in a world which objectively exists, and which I,

              in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.

              I firmly believe, but hope that someone will discover a more realistic way,

              or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do.

              Even the great initial success of the quantum theory

              does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game,

              although I am well aware that your younger colleagues

              interpret this as a consequence of senility."

 

              Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born.

 

  <li>"God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice

where they cannot be seen."

 

Stephen William Hawking

 

  <li>"Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

 Or quizzes upon world affairs,

 Nor with compliance

 Take any test.

 Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit

 A social science."

 

W. H. Auden

 

  <li>"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts--for support

rather than illumination."

                                       

Andrew Lang

 

  <li>"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better

experiment."

                                        

Lord Ernest Rutherford

 

  <li>"[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut

through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of

those who pursue the science of man."

                                        

Sir Francis Galton

 

  <li>"A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save

himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

 

Thomas Carlyle

 

  <li>"Statistics are the heart of democracy."  Simeon Strunsky

 

  <li>"Statistics are no substitute for judgment."  Henry Clay

 

  <li> "The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison

of its predictions with experience."

 

Milton Friedman

 

  <li> "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." 

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

  <li> "If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself."

 

Ghandi

 

  <li>"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to

interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical

construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations,

describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical

construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work"

 

John Von Neumann

 

  <li> "Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds-and

fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal." 

 

Cassius J. Keyser

 

  <li> "The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex

facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it."

 

A. N. Whitehead

 

  <li> "The aim ... is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for

      determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between

      two variables or groups of variables in a model . . . . The

      concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the

      'real' world the model purports to describe."

 

 H. Simon

 

  <li> "If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no

      antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation

      among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients,

      total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating

      the importance of the causes at work.

 

 R. A. Fisher

 

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