20th-century Statistician Quotes

When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

The body's ills are the least of ills, for they end only in death, which is but a little thing. But if the spirit dies, then all is lost.

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind...

George E. P. Box

The law of truly large numbers states: With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.

Frederick Mosteller

Years ago a statistician might have claimed that statistics deals with the processing of data... to-days statistician will be more likely to say that statistics is concerned with decision making in the face of uncertainty.

Herman Chernoff

I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.

There comes a time in the life of a scientist when he must convince himself either that his subject is so robust from a statistical point of view that the finer points of statistical inference he adopts are irrelevant or that the precise mode of inference he adopts is satisfactory.

A. W. F. Edwards

Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena.

Maurice Kendall

The variability of human beings in their illnesses and their reactions to them is a fundamental reason f or the planned clinical trial and not against it.

Austin Bradford Hill

It this terrible simplification that there is one Africa, and things go on in one way in Africa. We have to stop that, it is not respectful, and it's not very clever to think that way. I had the fortune to live and work for a time in the United States. I found out that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were different. And so it is in Africa, it's a lot of difference. What do we think it would be concurrency? And what is concurrency? In Sweden, we have no concurrency. We have serial monogamy. Vodka New Year's Eve, new partner for the spring, vodka Midsummer Eve, new partner for the fall, vodka, and it goes on like this, you know, and you collect a big number of ex's, and we've got a terrible chlamydia epidemic.

On the HIV epidemic