Statistical Quotes

1. "I do know that I've read somewhere that it's been statistically proven that in times of war, horror films are much more popular. I don't know why that is. You'd think it'd be the opposite. You'd think people would want to escape from it."
Author: Aaron Stanford

2. "Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down."
Author: Amanda Ripley

3. "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."
Author: Anatoly Karpov

4. "We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts."
Author: Anthony Bourdain

5. "Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat."
Author: Arabella Weir

6. "If there was some way of knowing which boys were likely to turn out to be decent men, boys that could love us back as passionately as we felt we could love them, then we could banish the likelihood of divorce and unhappiness to a statistically unlikely outcome."
Author: Belinda Jeffrey

7. "The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity."
Author: C.G. Jung

8. "I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do."
Author: Carrie Brownstein

9. "According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellbound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

10. "Here is your law enforcement and media question of the day: Was the TV show COPS real or BS?It might have been real incidents, but it wasn't really all that real. They edited the episodes to make it appear as if black people were committing fewer crimes. That is what the show creator John Langley said in a 2009 interview in response to people who were unhappy his long-running reality show, COPS, was showing too many black people getting arrested. What irritates me sometimes is critics still watch and say, 'Oh look, they misrepresent people of color.' That's absolutely not true. To the contrary, I show more white people than statistically what the truth is in terms of street crime..It's just the reverse. And I do that intentionally, because I do not want to contribute to negative stereotypes, said Langley, the show's producer, in 2009."
Author: Colin Flaherty

11. "Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

12. "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."
Author: Edward R. Tufte

13. "For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have."
Author: Emma Donoghue

14. "In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded."
Author: Esther Dyson

15. "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."
Author: George Gallup

16. "Imagine the earth's population of six billion people reduced to just one hundred representatives. Statistically, that makes 30 white, 70 non-white. It means 6 people own 59% of the wealth and they all live in North America. 80 are in substandard housing. One has an education. One owns a computer. Don't blame me if it all sounds crazy."
Author: Grant Morrison

17. "The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle."
Author: Hannah Arendt

18. "I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. My cousin was simply the easiest and most obvious target."
Author: Iain Banks

19. "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."
Author: Ian Hart

20. "Nonetheless, much has been learned by studying the statistical differences between the various human races."
Author: J. Philippe Rushton

21. "He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish."
Author: James Jones

22. "A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out."
Author: Jaron Lanier

23. "This mad psycho tells everyone to get into a field and says I'm going to pick one of you just one of youout of all of you to die and everyone's looking around thinking it's so unlikely to be me because there'sthousands of us so statistically it's completely unlikely and the psycho walks up and down looking ateveryone and when he gets near me he hesitates and he smiles and then he points right at me and saysyou're the one and the shock that it's me and yet of course it's me why wouldn't it be I knew all along"
Author: Jenny Downham

24. "I was sick of the body count that existed around my family. It seemed statistically that eventually the body count would include my family."
Author: Jessica Fortunato

25. "We don't know why we are here and the context of our role in the universe, and the thought of an infinite universe. It's something the human mind can't really grasp. It's statistically impossible that there's not life on other planets."
Author: Joel Kinnaman

26. "In any case, even if a usability test resolves a dispute, it doesn't do it in any kind of a statistically valid way. Unless you test thousands of people from all walks of life under all kinds of conditions, something that not even Microsoft can afford to do, you are not actually getting statistically meaningful results. Remember, the real strength of usability tests is in finding truffles—finding the broken bits so you can fix them. Actually looking at the results as if they were statistics is just not justified."
Author: Joel Spolsky

27. "Average men and women don't really exist except as a statistical conceit."
Author: John Taylor Gatto

28. "AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one."
Author: Larry Kramer

29. "Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat."
Author: Laura Ramsey

30. "Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise."
Author: Lewis Thomas

31. "Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All this, Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained, but the one who saw it in the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics."
Author: Maxwell

32. "I realize that Camilla is out very own statistical anomaly, an outlier that no one seems to know where to place."
Author: Melissa Keil

33. "Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants."
Author: Michael Crichton

34. "I took a course at Cal once called Statistical Analysis. And there was a guy in the course who used to make up all of his computations and he never used Sigma. He used his own initials. 'Cause he was the standard deviation."
Author: Mort Sahl

35. "Faith doesn't rely on odds or statistical data. God only requires that we have faith; the rest is up to him."
Author: Nancy Stephan

36. "Most of you will have heard the maxim "correlation does not imply causation." Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs."
Author: Nate Silver

37. "Children who eat breakfast are statistically more likely to do well at school than children who skip breakfast."
Author: Nessa Carey

38. "The univers is statistically more likely to be ironic than not,"
Author: Orson Scott Card

39. "In fact - statistically, as you know - people have done polls, research, and at least 80 percent or more or working media are liberal Democrats if they are involved with any party and certainly liberal in their philosophy."
Author: Pat Boone

40. "She found that obese kids watch no more television than kids who aren't obese. All the thin kids watch massive amounts of television, too. There was no statistical correlation between obesity and media use, period."
Author: Po Bronson

41. "What we call ‘normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.' There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal' forms of alienation. The ‘normally' alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal' majority as bad or mad."
Author: R.D. Laing

42. "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747."
Author: Richard Dawkins

43. "His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another."
Author: Robert Musil

44. "Ronald Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science."
Author: Ronald Fisher

45. "Without bragging, I've been blessed to have five of the greatest statistical years for a running back."
Author: Shaun Alexander

46. "The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica."
Author: Stephen Leacock

47. "If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it's probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That's the concept behind statistical significance—it's the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn't just random chance."
Author: T. Colin Campbell

48. "God speaks, spirits speak, computer speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

49. "I fire again and again, and none of the bullets come close."Statistically speaking," the Erudite boy next to me-his name is Will-says, grinning at me, "you should have hit the target at least once by now, even by accident." He is blond, with shaggy hair and a crease between his eyebrows."Is that so," I say without inflection."Yeah," he says. "I think you're actually defying nature."I grit my teeth and turn toward the target, resolving to at least stand still. If I can't muster the first task they give us,how will I ever make it through stage one?I squeeze the trigger,hard, and this time I'm ready for the recoil.It makes my hand jump back,but my feet stay planted.A bullet hole appears at the edge of the target,and I raise an eyebrow at Will."So you see,I'm right.The stats don't lie," he says.I smile a little."
Author: Veronica Roth

50. "Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."
Author: Willard Gibbs

Statistical Quotes Pictures