Famous statistician quotes

Question

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

Answer 1

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. ~Gregg Easterbrook

Answer 2

A bit obscure this one, but a great quote about subjective probability:

... There is no way, however, in which the individual can avoid the burden of responsibility for his own evaluations. The key cannot be found that will unlock the enchanted garden wherein, among the fairy-rings and the shrubs of magic wands, beneath the trees laden with monads and noumena, blossom forth the flowers of probabilitas realis. With these fabulous blooms safely in our button-holes we would be spared the necessity of forming opinions, and the heavy loads we bear upon our necks would be rendered superflous once and for all.

Bruno de Finetti, Theory of Probability, Vol 2

Answer 3

I just can't help myself, this is a provocative quote from E. T. Jaynes:

Many of us have already explored the road you are following, and we know what you will find at the end of it. It doesn't matter how many new words you drag into the discussion to avoid having to utter the word 'probability' in a sense different from frequency: likelihood, confidence, significance, propensity, support, credibility, acceptability, indifference, consonance, tenability; and so on, until the resources of the good Dr Roget are exhausted. All of these are attempts to represent degrees of plausibility by real numbers, and they are covered automatically by Cox's theorems. It doesn't matter which approach you happen to like philosophically; by the time you have made your methods fully consistent, you will be forced, kicking and screaming, back to the ones given by Laplace. Until you have achieved mathematical equivalence with Laplace's methods, it will be possible, by looking in specific problems with Galileo's magnification, to exhibit the defects in your methods.

Answer 4

This one is brand new, and Allen Wilcox is an epidemiologist, not a statistician, but whatever, I'm running with it.

"Data do not speak for themselves - they need context, and they need skeptical evaluation"

Answer 5

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

-Albert Einstein

I acknowledge that Einstein wasn't a statistician. However, Michael Friendly uses this quote in arguing for a greater role for visualizations in data analysis. I share that goal, and I think the quote works nicely.

Answer 6

"If you think that statistics has nothing to say about what you do or how you could do it better, then you are either wrong or in need of a more interesting job." - Stephen Senn (Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health, Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Answer 7

At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning.

Edward Tufte, www.edwardtufte.com

Answer 8

An ecologist is a statistician who likes to be outside.

-- apparently a good friend of Murray Cooper.

Answer 9

The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.

-- James Clerk Maxwell

Answer 10

In the long run, we're all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes.

A reference to survival analysis?!

Answer 11

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

-- Von Neumann

Answer 12

"I cannot conceal the fact here that in the [application of probability theory], I foresee many things happening which can cause one to be badly mistaken if he does not proceed cautiously.",

Bernoulli (1713) (via ET Jaynes)

"A statistician is someone who knows what to assume to be Gaussian"

Dikran Marsupial (2009) (not famous yet ;o).

Answer 13

There is no free hunch.

-- Robert Abelson

Answer 14

A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.

-- M.J. Moroney

Answer 15

efficiency = statistical efficiency x usage.

-- John Tukey

Answer 16

One sees, from this Essay, that the theory of probabilities is basically just common sense reduced to calculus; it makes one appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it.

Another one from Laplace

Answer 17

Everybody knows that probability and statistics are the same thing, and statistics is nothing but correlation. Now the correlation is just the cosine of an angle, thus all is trivial.

-- Emil Artin, according to Kai Lai Chung in Elementary probability theory (right, Artin might not been known primarily as a statistician)

Answer 18

[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

Answer 19

"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may be cast." - Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

Found here.

Answer 20

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

Not quite from a statistician, but I nonetheless like to quote this one in lectures. It nicely sums up what we as data analysts do.

Answer 21

The Median Isn't the Message

--Stephen Jay Gould

Answer 22

These days the statistician is often asked such questions as "Are you a Bayesian?" "Are you a frequentist?" "Are you a data analyst?" "Are you a designer of experiments?". I will argue that the appropriate answer to ALL of these questions can be (and preferably should be) "yes", and that we can see why this is so if we consider the scientific context for what statisticians do.

--G.E.P. Box

Answer 23

You may be too vague to be wrong and that's really bad cause that's just obscuring the issue.

Bruce Sterling

Answer 24

All information looks like noise until you break the code. —Hiro in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)

Answer 25

"New methods always look better than old ones. Neural nets are better than logistic regression, support vector machines are better than neural nets, etc." - Brad Efron

Answer 26

From a user on MedStats (Google Group):

... no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects hypotheses; he rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his evidence and his ideas." - Sir Ronald A. Fisher (1956)

Answer 27

CauseWeb has a collection of statistics quotations. Many have already been repeated here, but it has plenty that haven't yet been quoted, such as

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."

(Falsely attributed to Sir Winston Churchill.) For the rest, follow the CauseWeb links to Resources->Fun->Quote.

Answer 28

"After 17 years of interacting with physicians, I have come to realize that many of them are adherents of a religion they call Statistics... Like any good religion, it involves vague mysteries capable of contradictory and irrational interpretation. It has a priesthood and a class of mendicant friars. And it provides Salvation: Proper invocation of the religious dogmas of Statistics will result in publication in prestigious journals."

David S. Salsburg (author of The Lady Tasting Tea), quoted at "Pithypedia".

Answer 29

To understand God's Thoughts we must study statistics for these are the measure of His purpose.

--Florence Nightingale

Answer 30

“Statistics is much like a streetlight. Not very enlightening, but nice for supporting you”

Storm P