Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.
Gregg Easterbrook
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
Algebraic notation is what you write when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
98% of all statistics are made up.
In God we trust. All others must bring data.
Statistics are no substitute for judgment
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
Aaron Levenstein
Statistics are people with the tears wiped from their eyes
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable.
Bobby Bragan
There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
Statistics can be made to prove anything – even the truth.
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.
Paul Brodeur
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.
Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination.
Andrew Lang
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Statistics in the hands of an engineer are like a lamppost to a drunk—they’re used more for support than illumination.
Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases.
Theodor Billroth
It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them.
Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.
William W. Watt
An approximate answer to the right question is worth a good deal more than the exact answer to an approximate problem.
We make decisions in the dark of data.
Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.
W.I.E. Gates
To be a statistician is great!! You never have to be “absolutely sure” of something… Being “reasonably certain” is enough!
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
Rex Stout
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.
Statisticians are not number librarians.
I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to digest. The only one I can ever remember is that if all the people who go to sleep in church were laid end to end they would be a lot more comfortable.
Mrs. Robert A. Taft
To guess is cheap. To guess wrongly is expensive.
Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture….
H.G. Wells
Facts are such horrid things!
The average human has one breast and one testicle.
Des McHale
Then there was the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.
While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
Arthur Conan Doyle
A statistician is a man who comes to the rescue of figures that cannot lie for themselves.
A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.
M.J. Moroney
When the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem begins to look like a nail.
Statistics may be defined as “a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.”
W.A. Wallis
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain
After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, “Lies – damned lies – and statistics,” still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.
Leonard Courtney
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman, who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Mark Twain
Never let school interfere with your education.
Mark Twain
The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.
Laplace
All information looks like noise until you break the code.
We don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.
At this stage, the computers in schools are typically older than the children.
A whole essay might be written on the danger of thinking without images.
I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live.
Louis D. Brandeis
Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Joe Stalin
Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.
A Mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
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
I never keep a scorecard or the batting averages. I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head.
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death
I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.