Top 100 Statistical Quotes
#1. The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.
Ilya Prigogine
#2. Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
William Golding
#3. The statement that although the past can be recorded, the future cannot, is translatable into the statistical statement: Isolated states of order are always postinteraction states, never preinteraction states.
Hans Reichenbach
#4. Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.
Loren Eiseley
#5. Away from or classed differently from a main or related body 2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample 1.
Malcolm Gladwell
#6. Although I speak very highly of Marines, whether they are enlisted or officers, there always seems to be a statistical anomaly when it comes to the ratio of shitbags to non-shitbags everywhere in the world.
Jeffrey Sands
#7. Statistical fact: cops will never pull over a man in a sweet van
if he's carrying forty pounds of sinsemilla buds. Another fact:
ninety percent of all statistics are made up.
Daniel Younger
#8. What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence," Harry explained. "It doesn't carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#9. Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.
Will Self
#10. Lorenz was the charismatic, flamboyant thinker - he didn't conduct a single statistical analysis in his life - while Tinbergen did the nitty-gritty of actual data collection.
Frans De Waal
#11. Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University.
George Stigler
#12. The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
Terence McKenna
#13. It is enough for a Psychohistorian, as such, to know his Biostatistics and his Neurochemical Electromathematics. Some know nothing else and are fit only to be statistical technicians. But a Speaker must be able to discuss the Plan without mathematics.
Isaac Asimov
#14. You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.
Nate Silver
#15. Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life
a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality
then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?
Gloria Steinem
#16. What are you doing a study on right now?"
"A study on the statistical probablity of love at first sight.
Jennifer E. Smith
#17. An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.
Edmund Phelps
#18. It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism' which produces 'order from disorder' and the new one, producing 'order from order'.
Erwin Schrodinger
#19. I focus on the most important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy
that is, the inability to reason about uncertainties and risk.
Gerd Gigerenzer
#20. We need no elaborate statistical proof that trade depends on prosperity in the industrial countries.
Arthur Lewis
#21. The early years of statistical development were dominated by men. Many women were working in the field, but they were almost all employed in doing the detailed calculations needed for statistical analysis, and were indeed called "computers".
David Salsburg
#22. You know what I hate, man? Guys that you know haven't seen the film: they just quote a bunch of statistical bullshit.
Jon Gruden
#23. I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone - the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.
George Gallup
#24. After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.
Rudolph A. Marcus
#25. statistical reality is the only one, then that is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgment and decision are not only superfluous but impossible.
C. G. Jung
#26. There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.
C. G. Jung
#27. Statistical projections which speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind, possess the advantage of fixing the attention on a great number of important facts.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#28. The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#29. 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
#30. Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality - which indeed may be a rare achievement.
Michael Leunig
#31. We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.
Elizabeth Blackburn
#32. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring "Sanity is not statistical," with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.
George Orwell
#33. I'm not a role model. I'm an aberation. A statistical anomoly. Following in my footsteps is about the dumbest thing you could ever do.
Patrick Rothfuss
#34. Fairness is not about statistical equality.
John Bercow
#35. Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.
Anthony Giddens
#36. and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all
Steven Pinker
#37. The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.
Samuel R. Delany
#38. Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow.
Ray Kurzweil
#39. None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.
Bill James
#40. Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).
Charles Wheelan
#41. I realize that Camilla is out very own statistical anomaly, an outlier that no one seems to know where to place.
Melissa Keil
#42. A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#43. By relying on the statistical information rather than a gut feeling, you allow the data to lead you to be in the right place at the right time. To remain as emotionally free from the hurly burley of the here and now is one of the only ways to succeed.
James O'Shaughnessy
#44. There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.
Ian Hart
#45. The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing.
Hubert M. Blalock
#46. The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.
Ayn Rand
#47. What are you really studying?"
He leans back to look at her. "The statistical probability of love at first sight.
Jennifer E. Smith
#48. I think I have found a statistical link between excessive volunteerism and victimology, the pairing of accomplished, intelligent, motivated women who are preyed upon because of the depth of their compassion.
A.J. Rich
#49. It has been explained in chapter 1 that the laws of physics, as we know them, are statistical laws.2 They have a lot to do with the natural tendency of things to go over into disorder.
Erwin Schrodinger
#50. The number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.
George Stigler
#51. I'd just like to see - in writing about baseball - more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.
John Thorn
#52. The oral (Laetrile) had been 'toxified' by adding cyano-urea in the NCI ... (NCI's) Mayo (Clinic) dismissed well responding patients to discard them from statistical evaluation ... This kind of fraud which I expressed ... and which was openly published ... has ... not resulted in any denial.
Hans Alfred Nieper
#53. If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.
Lev Grossman
#54. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#55. These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.
Alan Turing
#56. There's no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It's next to impossible.
John W. Rogers Jr.
#57. Statistical high Vegas odds probability is that nothing of any significance will ever happen to you in your entire boring life.
Doug Stanhope
#58. IQ is a statistical method for quantifying specific kinds of problem-solving ability, mathematically convenient but not necessarily corresponding to a real attribute of the human brain, and not necessarily representing whatever it is that we mean by 'intelligence'.
Ian Stewart
#59. Woman in heels stands a statistical likelihood of ending her evening with her shoes in her handbag, barefoot and demanding a piggyback to the taxi stand in order to "keep her tights clean." Men are invariably the pig whose back is called for.
Caitlin Moran
#60. If you just heard 90 percent of dentists recommend something, it's too statistical. Nine out of 10 says: Well, it's just virtually everyone. It leads you to think of that joke about the one dentist. But so much of communication.
Frank Luntz
#61. On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer.
Lewis Mumford
#62. It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.
Werner Heisenberg
#63. It is a statistical fact that the wicked work harder to reach hell than the righteous do to enter heaven
Josh Billings
#64. Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.
Edmund Phelps
#65. The trial designed to bring the most rigorous statistical analysis to the cause of lung cancer barely required elementary mathematics to prove its point.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#66. What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.
Carl Sagan
#67. Average men and women don't really exist except as a statistical conceit.
John Taylor Gatto
#68. The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.
Lawrence Eagleburger
#70. If you want to convince the world that a fish can sense your emotions, only one statistical measure will suffice: the p-value.
Charles Seife
#71. There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics ... Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual couplings often has the feel of a statistical survey.
John Allen Paulos
#72. I like to do projects in which you can see statistical results. I am very happy for all these small children, who have been the biggest group of victims of iodine deficiency.
Anatoly Karpov
#73. I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.
Christopher Hitchens
#75. Whenever I read statistical reports, I try to imagine my unfortunate contemporary, the Average Person, who, according to these reports, has 0.66 children, 0.032 cars, and 0.046 TVs.
Kato Lomb
#76. Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.
Karl Marx
#77. From empathy and sexuality to science inclination and extroversion, statistical analysis of 122 different characteristics involving 13,301 individuals shows that men and women, by and large, do not fall into different groups.
Christian Rudder
#78. When we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you're doing when you wake up each day.
Tom Rath
#79. Coincidence", he finally said. "Statisticans looking for connections can always find odd coincidences and statistical anomalies, if they try hard enough.
Brandon Sanderson
#80. Nonetheless, much has been learned by studying the statistical differences between the various human races.
J. Philippe Rushton
#81. Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.
Edward R. Tufte
#82. My very first publication was an estimator - this was a statistical procedure - a kind of invention. My father got a patent and started a business; it wasn't successful, but maybe I have some of him in me.
Robert J. Shiller
#83. If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.
Richard Dawkins
#84. A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made.
Morris H. DeGroot
#85. Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
George Orwell
#86. Without bragging, I've been blessed to have five of the greatest statistical years for a running back.
Shaun Alexander
#87. She wondered how it was that she'd never truly studied this statistical symbol before: a figure split in two, a pair of empty circles on either side.
Jodi Picoult
#88. Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!
H.G.Wells
#89. Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.
Charlie Munger
#90. The actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.
Ronald Fisher
#91. As the official statistics would have it, if you're a young, single, white student who rents a flat in Liverpool and regularly visits pubs and clubs, the statistical chances of you not having taken an illegal drug in the last year would be slim to none. Conversely,
Max Daly
#92. There is a tendency in all of us to ask for better statistical performance. There is a tendency to impose quotas behind which usually lies imposition of pressure to achieve improved statistics.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#93. We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.
J. Willard Gibbs
#94. Science of yoga and ayurveda is subtler than the science of medicine, because science of medicine is often victim of statistical manipulation.
Amit Ray
#95. A good way to do econometrics is to look for good natural experiments and use statistical methods that can tidy up the confounding factors that Nature has not controlled for us.
Daniel McFadden
#96. You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
Walter Lippmann
#97. If God's grace and blessing only rest on Christians, we have a problem because there is no statistical difference between Christians and non-Christians in terms of fertility.
Jeremy Steele
#98. No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.
E. O. Wilson
#99. The issue of poverty is not a statistical issue. It is a human issue.
James Wolfensohn
#100. If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we'd have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they're erratic. People do crazy things that don't make sense.
Sara Sheridan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
