Famous statistician quotes

Question

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

Answer 1

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Claude Elwood Shannon

Answer 2

…the statistician knows…that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world.

George Box (JASA, 1976, Vol. 71, 791-799)

Answer 3

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage

Answer 4

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

~Joseph Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945

Answer 5

This is unlikely to be a popular quote, but anyway,

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

Answer 6

"Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten."

-Terry Pratchett

Answer 7

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

-- probably: Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911).

Answer 8

The plural of anecdote is not data.

-- Roger Brinner

(in the context of Anecdotal_evidence)

Answer 9

"The first time I was in a statistics course, I was there to teach it"

John Tukey (link)

Answer 10

"It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without statistics." - Andrejs Dunkels

Answer 11

"To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.”

Box, Hunter, and Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters (1978).

Answer 12

The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.

-– Sir Ronald A. Fisher

Answer 13

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

Answer 14

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

-- John Tukey

Answer 15

May I add this one, because I like Jan's contributions to psychometrics and statistics...

Causal interpretation of the results of regression analysis of observational data is a risky business. The responsibility rests entirely on the shoulders of the researcher, because the shoulders of the statistical technique cannot carry such strong inferences.

Jan de Leeuw, homepage

Answer 16

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence."

Often attributed to Carl Sagan, but he was paraphrasing sceptic Marcello Truzzi. Doubtless the concept is even more ancient.

David Hume said, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence".

One could argue this is not a quote about statistics. However, applied statistics is ultimately in the business of evaluating the quality of evidence for or against some proposition.

Answer 17

Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.

-- Brad Efron

Answer 18

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Mark Twain (okay, so he's not a statistician)

Answer 19

The primary product of a research inquiry is one or more measures of effect size, not p values.

Cohen, J. (1990). Things I have learned (so far). American Psychologist, 45, 1304-1312.

Answer 20

Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.

Answer 21

preamble: There is even a class of user now days who sees the significance stars rather like the gold stars my grandson sometimes gets on his homework:

Three solid gold (significance) stars on the main effects will do very nicely, thank you, and if there are a few little stars here and there on the interactions, so much the better!

W.N. Venables

Exegeses on Linear Models

Answer 22

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

George Bernard Shaw

Answer 23

My thesis is simply this: probability does not exist. - Bruno de Finetti

Answer 24

We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

Rutherford D. Roger

Answer 25

The Earth is round. p < .05

Jacob Cohen

Answer 26

When I see articles with lots of significance tests, I say that the statisticians are p-ing on the research.

Herman Friedmann (by recollection, he said this in class)

Answer 27

60% of the time, it works every time.

-Brian Fantana

Answer 28

9 out of ten dentists think the 10th dentist is an idiot.

• No idea who said it.

Answer 29

'Figures fool when fools figure'.

Henry Oliver Lancaster

Answer 30

It would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable

~ Spock, "The Enterprise Incident",stardata 5027.3