Statistics Quotes

General

• "Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write." H.G.Wells

• "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

• "Facts speak louder than statistics" Mr. Justice Streatfield (1950)

• "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

• "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts--for support rather than illumination." Andrew Lang

• "A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him." Thomas Carlyle

• "Statistics are the heart of democracy." Simeon Strunsky

• "Statistics are no substitute for judgment." Henry Clay

• "If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics—it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them." Lewis Carroll

  Statistics and Science

• "Statistics is the grammar of science." Karl Pearson

• "[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

• "Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental." George E. P. Box

• "Scientific research is a process of guided learning. The object of statistical methods is to make that process as efficient as possible." George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter and J. Stuart Hunter

  On Data Analysis

• "We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them." William James

• "Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values." John Tukey

• "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

• "In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure... and forget that there is a difference." George Udny Yule

  Experimentation

• "... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation." R. A. Fisher

• "To call the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of." R. A. Fisher

• "You can't fix by analysis what you bungled by design." Anon., quoted in Light, Singer and Willett

• "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Lord Ernest Rutherford

• "The development of Western Science is based on two great achievements; the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationship by systematic experiment (Renaissance)." Albert Einstein

  Inference

• "... 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

• "... 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

• "By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece." Miguel de Cervantes from Don Quixote

• "The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience." Milton Friedman

• "In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods." John Leonard

• "Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations." Kate Crawford

• "Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What `big picture' of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term `abduction' to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as `inference to the best explanation.' It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences." Alister E. McGrath

• "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." From http://xkcd.com/552/

  Modeling

• "All models are wrong, but some are useful." George E. P. Box

• "Models are to be used but not believed." H. Theil

• "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

• "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

• "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

• "Models should be as simple as possible, but not more so." Attributed to Einstein

• "An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem." John Tukey