Inspirational statistics quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.
Famous Statistics Quotes
Statistics is the grammar of science. – Karl Pearson
Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental. – George E. P. Box
All statistics have outliers. – Nenia Campbell
In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure… and forget that there is a difference. – George Udny Yule
We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them. – William James
Statistics real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical. – Max Morris
Statistics in the hands of activists have power. – Ela Bhatt
Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty. – John Finley
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. – R. A. Fisher
… the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation. – R. A. Fisher
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable. – Mark Twain
Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say. – William W. Watt
Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue. – R. A. Fisher
The science of statistics is the chief instrumentality through which the progress of civilization is now measured, and by which its development hereafter will be largely controlled. – S. N. D. North
Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models. – George Box
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. – H.G. Wells
Most people use statistics the way a drunkard uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination. – Mark Twain
While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives. – Elizur Wright
… the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis. – R. A. Fisher
… a hypothesis test tells us whether the observed data are consistent with the null hypothesis, and a confidence interval tells us which hypotheses are consistent with the data. – William C. Blackwelder
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. – Aaron Levenstein
One more f*g*t of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values. – John Tukey
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. – H.G.Wells
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death – Hilaire Belloc
Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off. – Paul Brodeur
In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death. – Gunter Grass
Statistics, likelihoods, and probabilities mean everything to men, nothing to God. – Richelle E. Goodrich
Facts speak louder than statistics – Mr. Justice Streatfield
An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem. – John Tukey
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece. – Miguel de Cervantes
The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ. – John Boyle O’Reilly
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up. – Rex Stout
Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. – Vin Scully
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death. – Hilaire Belloc
The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability. – Pierre Simon
You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that your younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. – Albert Einstein
God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen. – Stephen William Hawking
Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime. – Alphonse Allais
Statistics are no substitute for judgment. – Henry Clay
Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures. – Evan Esar
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. – Carl Sagan
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science. – W. H. Auden
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts–for support rather than illumination. – Andrew Lang
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. – Joseph Stalin
Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like wh*r*s to use as one pleases. – Theodor Billroth
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment. – Lord Ernest Rutherford
[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the science of man. – Sir Francis Galton
The essential feature of statistics is a prudent and systematic ignoring of details. – Erwin Schrodinger
Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it. – Brad Efron
A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him. – Thomas Carlyle
Statistics are the heart of democracy. – Simeon Strunsky
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience. – Milton Friedman
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself. – Ghandi
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work – John Von Neumann
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. – John Tukey
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. – Jean Baudrillard
Statistics can be made to prove anything – even the truth. – Unknown
Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds-and fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal. – Cassius J. Keyser
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts… Seek simplicity and distrust it. – A. N. Whitehead
Statistics are just a way for the mathematician to evangelize his faith. – Hunter Brinkmeier
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment. – Ernest Rutherford
The aim … is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model . . . . The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the ‘real’ world the model purports to describe. – H. Simon
If … we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work. – R. A. Fisher
Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance. – Morris Kline
Models should be as simple as possible, but not more so. – Einstein
No aphorism is more frequently repeated in connection with field trials, than that we must ask Nature few questions, or, ideally, one question at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logical and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed, if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed. – R. A. Fisher
Randomization is too important to be left to chance. – J. D. Petruccelli
