Quotes About Estimates

#1. chief executive of Google, reckoned in 2010 that about five exabytes of data, or the equivalent of 250,000 years of DVD-quality video, was created in the world every two days. By some estimates, in 2013 we will create that much data every 10 minutes.

Portfolio Penguin

#2. Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.

Seth Shostak

#3. Overwork is this decade's cocaine, the problem without a name," says Bryan Robinson, who has written widely about the phenomenon and estimates that as many as 25 percent of Americans have the addiction.

Jim Loehr

#4. Determinants of prices have their effect only through the medium of the subjective estimates of individuals; and the extent to which any given factor influences these subjective estimates can never be predicted.

Ludwig Von Mises

#5. We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

Nate Silver

#6. If I plug my estimates into the Magic Formula, and it comes out cheap, that's good.

Joel Greenblatt

#7. By some analysts' estimates, the Cupertino company now pockets as much as 80 percent of the profits of the entire cellphone handset business.

Brent Schlender

#8. The fashionable term now is "Big Data." IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36

Nate Silver

#9. James T Kirk: Mr.Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?
Montgomery Scott: Certainly, Sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?

Harve Bennett

#10. In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor

Tom DeMarco

#11. The CIA estimates that Iraq probably has a few hundred metric tons of chemical weapons agents, for mustard gas, sarin, and other deadly concoctions. This is addition to an extensive capacity to produce biological weapons, including anthrax and ricin, which is fatal within 24 to 36 hours of exposure.

Richard Armitage

#12. I think the latest estimates were that we have about 250,000 millionaires and billionaires. President Obama wants to increase their taxes 13 percent.

Joe Walsh

#13. Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.

Nathan Myhrvold

#14. Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000.

Sam Kean

#15. I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

Warren Christopher

#16. According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters.

Carl Sagan

#17. In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

Benjamin Franklin

#18. One would hope that you would have a CBO director who does not let ideology get in the way of making good estimates, [Congress] values having a credible institution that they can rely on to give them the best estimates possible.

Alice Rivlin

#19. The selective activation of compatible memories explains anchoring: the high and the low numbers activate different sets of ideas in memory. The estimates of annual temperature draw on these biased samples of ideas and are therefore biased as well.

Daniel Kahneman

#20. If a man looks upon any other man and estimates that man as less than himself, then he is stealing from the other. He is stealing the other's birthright - that of equality.

Neville Goddard

#21. Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men.

Barbara Demick

#22. The great man is not so great as folks think, and the dull man is not quite so stupid as he seems. The difference in our estimates of men lies in the fact that one individual is able to get his goods into the show-window, and the other is not aware that he has any show-window or any goods.

Elbert Hubbard

#23. In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed.

Richard Engel

#24. These are estimates that are done by the experts as to how much they expect we could get from the first lease sale that would take place in ANWR, and the estimate is about $2.5 billion.

Gale Norton

#25. And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance rates.

Steven D. Levitt

#26. Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#27. In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.

May Sarton

#28. Society is like a schoolmaster who estimates boys according to their conformity to a standard that is easiest for running a school.

Henry Sidgwick

#29. Of the many species that have existed on earth
estimates run as high as fifty billion
more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
more than a rounding error.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#30. It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.

Richard P. Feynman

#31. While the Environmental Genome Project does not seek to assign allele frequencies, we are aware of the importance of accurate allele frequency estimates for future epidemiologic studies and the large sample sizes such estimates will require.

Samuel Wilson

#32. Current estimates are that 38,000 elephants are being slaughtered each year in Africa. At this rate, elephants on that continent will all be gone in less than twenty years.

Jodi Picoult

#33. Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available - the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.

M.J. Rose

#34. Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders.

David Grann

#35. Shirer estimates that between 1930 and 1933 a substantial section of German industry was financing the Nazi Party to the extent of many millions of marks a year.

Heinrick Fraenkel

#36. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#37. Foreclosure is to no one's benefit. I've heard estimates that mortgage investors lose 40 to 50 percent on their investment if it goes into foreclosure.

Henry Paulson

#38. The professional cleaning industry estimates that 85 percent of the dirt we bring into our homes enters via our shoes or our pets' paws.

Christopher Gavigan

#39. There is mounting concern worldwide over the consumption of alcohol. The U.S. government estimates that 10.6 million adults are alcoholics and that one family in four is troubled by alcohol. It is a factor in half of all the nation's traffic deaths.

Russell M. Nelson

#40. Whatever our place allotted to us by Providence that for us is the post of honor and duty. God estimates us, not by the position we are in, but by the way in which we fill it.

Tryon Edwards

#41. During construction, when a worker died, his body was built right into the Wall itself. No one knew how many corpses lay within the stone and mortar, but some estimates ran as high as three million souls.

Gordon Korman

#42. Albert B. Saye, who has searched hardest for debtors among the colonists, estimates that not more than a dozen debtors released from prison by Parliament ever came to Georgia, if indeed that many came.

Kenneth Coleman

#43. Don't hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son.

Saint Augustine

#44. How reliable are the computer [climate] models on which possible future climates are based? Not very. All will agree that the task of modeling climate is vast, because of the estimates that have to be made and the rubbery quality of much of the data.

Don Aitkin

#45. Estimates show that small businesses contribute 60-80 percent of the net new jobs annually.

Michael K. Simpson

#46. Brody cannot believe the size of the creature, and with a classic, practical understatement tells Quint his assessment: You're gonna need a bigger boat. Awestruck, they all view the full-sized, massive shark circling the boat. Quint estimates it is 25 feet long: Three tons of him.

Roy Scheider

#47. In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

Edmund Phelps

#48. There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.

Eric Topol

#49. I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Benjamin Franklin

#50. Consider these current rough estimates: Each day, we compose 154 billion e-mails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog posts and 1.3 million blog comments on WordPress alone. On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That's just in the United States:

Clive Thompson

#51. The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others

Tom DeMarco

#52. I have also known of weight estimates by ultrasound to be off by as much as five pounds.

Ina May Gaskin

#53. I do believe we have to understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates. But you have more public service - certainly many of you - than I have ever had, and you recognize that this is not unusual.

David Kay

#54. The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.

John Perkins

#55. Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.

Jeroen Van Der Veer

#56. Puerto Rico has a stray dog problem. Tens of thousands of homeless canines - hundreds of thousands, by some estimates - live and die on the streets and beaches all over this Caribbean island of almost four million people.

Juliana Hatfield

#57. Estimates put the current number of Internet-connected devices at 10 billion.

Bruce Schneier

#58. Generalizations about the "way women are" and estimates of what is appropriate for most women no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#59. A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Marcus Aurelius

#60. The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.

Scott Stossel

#61. The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.

Emily Oster

#62. George E. Johnson marketed the "relaxer," a chemical product used to straighten otherwise curly African American hair. According to some estimates, the black hair care industry is worth more than one billion dollars annually.

Nicola Yoon

#63. But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.

Henry Morton Stanley

#64. Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics.

Ramez Naam

#65. Most of us form estimates of our intelligence, wisdom, and moral fiber that are considerably higher than an objective estimate would warrant; no doubt 90 percent of us think ourselves well above average along these lines.

Alvin Plantinga

#66. A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.

Burt Rutan

#67. Estimates of the ionic mobilities vary over a considerable range; but in any event, the positive ionic defect is much more mobile in the solid than in the liquid, and its mobility varies very little with the temperature.

Lars Onsager

#68. The righteousness of God in His election means, then, that as a righteous Judge God perceives and estimates as such the lost cause of the creature, and that in spite of its opposition He gives sentence in its favour, fashioning for it His own righteousness.

Karl Barth

#69. By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.

Janet Yellen

#70. Our estimates are that none of them will come out alive unless they surrender to us quickly.

Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

#71. [Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.

Michael Pollan

#72. God always estimates how diligent a person is to his work.

Sunday Adelaja

#73. It was apparent that many of the speeds used in the estimates were too large. The scale guiding wind speeds wasn't in tune with reality.

Joe Schaefer

#74. We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.

Sigmund Freud

#75. The various estimates of the height of the true summit vary considerably, but by taking an average of these figures it is possible to say confidently that the summit of Rum Doodle is 40,000 1/2 feet above sea level.

William Ernest Bowman

#76. Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

John Ortberg

#77. My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

C.V. Wedgwood

#78. Output per worker in England did not increase at all between 1500 and 1800, according to the estimates by Angus Maddison in his 2006 volume The World Economy, a trusted source.

Edmund S. Phelps

#79. many teams that say they have an estimation problem actually have a negotiation problem. A manager asks for an estimate. The team says, "That will take four days." The manager makes a counteroffer, "Can you make it two?" This is no longer a discussion about estimates. It's a negotiation.

Elisabeth Hendrickson

#80. Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.

Christina Romer

#81. Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.

Joseph Stiglitz

#82. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

John Quincy Adams

#83. Making out an invitation list for a party brings out the worst in everyone. It is then that our most ruthless estimates of the people we know come into play.

Sydney J. Harris

#84. He estimates that perhaps 250,000 slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.

Howard Zinn

#85. As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.

George Wald