Statistics Quotes

There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious.

All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile.

A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

All statistics have outliers.

Statistics, likelihoods, and probabilities mean everything to men, nothing to God.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don't know we don't know.

I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys-but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.

Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence” (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly.

...that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.

The only meaningful statistic in warfare is when the other side quits.

Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?'
'Why am I surrounded,' his usual understanding self today, 'by statistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant.

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.