Famous statistician quotes

Question

What is your favorite statistician quote? This is community wiki, so please one quote per answer.

Answer 1

The researcher armed with a confidence interval, but deprived of the false respectability of statistical significance, must work harder to convince himself and others of the importance of his findings. This can only be good.

Michael Oakes, Statistical inference: A commentary for the social and behavioural sciences (NY: Wiley, 1986)

Answer 2

The roll of the dice will never abolish chance

Written in 1897 by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) , a famous French poet - In French :

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard

Answer 3

The probability is like the stick used by the blind man to feel his way. If he could see, he would not need the cane, just as if we knew which horse runs faster, then we would not need probability theory.

Stanislaw Lem

Answer 4

"What the use of a p-value implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred."

Harold Jeffreys (Theory of Probability)

Answer 5

Everybody is a Bayesian. It's just that some know it, and some don't. - Trivellore Raghunathan

Answer 6

Don't think -- use the computer.

Attributed ("tongue in cheek," just to make sure we understand the intent) to "G. Dyke." Quoted in Phillip I. Good and James W. Hardin, Common Errors in Statistics: see the very first page of Part I.

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A "G. Dyke" is cited in the bibliography as the author of How to avoid bad statistics. Field Crops Res. 1997; 51: 165-197. This apparently is George Dyke, who later in the book is quoted more at length:

The availability of 'user-friendly' statistical software has caused authors to become increasingly careless about the logic of interpreting their results, and to rely uncritically on computer output, often using the 'default option' when something a little different (usually, but not always, a little more complicated) is correct, or at least more appropriate.

[Cited on pp 71-72 in the first edition, 2003.]

A related quotation graces the beginning of Chapter 7:

Cut out the appropriate part of the computer output and paste it onto the draft of the paper.

Answer 7

A quote from Karl Pearson:

The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material

I think of statistics as, essentially, the methodology of science, so that's how I interpret this quote.

Answer 8

Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

--Tukey

Answer 9

"The Central Limit Theorem is about the journey and the Strong Law of Large Numbers is about the destination." stats.SE user cardinal in a comment on this question

Answer 10

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

~ Hillaire Belloc in The Silence of the Sea

Answer 11

No statistican, but useful for the profession:

The perfect is the enemy of the good - Voltaire

Answer 12

We statisticians, as a police of science (a label some dislike but I am proud of...), have the fundamental duty of helping others to engage in statistical thinking as a necessary step of scientific inquiry and evidence-based policy formulation. In order to truly fulfill this task, we must constantly firm up and deepen our own foundation, and resist the temptation of competing for “methods and results” without pondering deeply whether we are helping others or actually harming them by effectively encouraging more false discoveries or misguided policies. Otherwise, we indeed can lose our identity, no matter how much we are desired or feared now.

Xiao-Li Meng

Answer 13

The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal thruths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of physical universe

-- Karl Pearson

Answer 14

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Also known as Laplace's demon

Answer 15

With three constants, I can fit a dog. With four, I can make it bark.

Attributed to William Reifsnyder, in a personal communication to me. Unfortunately I can't find a reference on the 'web.

Answer 16

Found in Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation by Peter Norvig

Most of the time, when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you have screwed up the experiment

(Michael Wigler)

in the sense of

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

(Carl Sagan)

which is based on a similar quote by Pierre Laplace

Answer 17

"...a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data."

E.T. Jaynes

Answer 18

It's not really about statistics, but I think it applies to statistics:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Answer 19

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

George Box

Answer 20

"One death is a tragedy, 100,000 deaths are statistics."

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Answer 21

The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.

by R.A. Fisher

Answer 22

Good statistics involves principled argument that conveys an interesting and credible point.

-- Robert P. Abelson, (1995) "Statistics as Principled Argument"

We left in our mathematical model a gap for the exercise of a more intuitive process of personal judgement

-- Egon Pearson, quoted in Abelson (1995).

Answer 23

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

~ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839) ch. 2

Answer 24

An argument over the meaning of words is a matter of law, an argument grounded in empirical data and quantitative estimates is an argument about science.

~ Razib Khan (though he is not a statistician or famous)

Answer 25

Do not make things easy for yourself by speaking or thinking of data as if they were different from what they are; and do not go off from facing data as they are, to amuse your imagination by wishing they were different from what they are. Such wishing is pure waste of nerve force, weakens your intellectual power, and gets you into habits of mental confusion.

--Mary Everest Boole

Answer 26

A variation on the Fisher quotation given here is

Hiring a statistician after the data have been collected is like hiring a physician when your patient is in the morgue. He may be able to tell you what went wrong, but he is unlikely to be able to fix it.

But I heard this attributed to Box, not Fisher.

Answer 27

...Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress.

--George Box 1992

Answer 28

Statistics' real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical.

Steve Vardeman and Max Morris

Answer 29

Context: An F-test is often a poor way to justify pooling, because F-test is not robust against non-normality.

"To make a preliminary test on variances is rather like putting to sea in a rowing boat to find out whether conditions are sufficiently calm for an ocean liner to leave port." (G.E.P. Box, "Non-normality and tests on variances",

Source: Biometrika, 40 (1953), pp 318-335, quote on page 333; via from Moore & McCabe.

(props to Tim Hesterberg: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-February/154856.html)

Answer 30

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." albert einstein