American Statistician Quotes

Milton Friedman
Nate Silver
Harold Hotelling
Edward Tufte
Wesley Clair Mitchell
Garrett Hardin
Gertrude Mary Cox

A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made.

The primary function of a statistical consultant in a research organization is to furnish advice and guidance in the collection and use of numerical data to provide quantitative foundations for decisions.

A statistician is usually either right or wrong.

Wesley Clair Mitchell
Wesley Clair Mitchell
A useful property of a test of significance is that it exerts a sobering influence on the type of experimenter who jumps to conclusions on scanty data, and who might otherwise try to make everyone excited about some sensational treatment effect that can well be ascribed to the ordinary variation in his experiment.

Gertrude Mary Cox
Gertrude Mary Cox
A mature science, with respect to the matter of errors in variables, is not one that measures its variables without error, for this is impossible. It is, rather, a science which properly manages its errors, controlling their magnitudes and correctly calculating their implications for substantive conclusions.

An Israeli statistician named Hare, Had five factors he wished to compare, Levels of each were nine, So of course his design Was a Hebro-Greco-Latin square.

Joseph L. Fleiss
Joseph L. Fleiss
I have learned repeatedly, however, that the typical behavioral scientist approaches applied statistics with considerable uncertainty (if not actual nervousness), and requires a verbal-intuitive exposition, rich in redundancy and with many concrete illustrations.

Archaeologists unearthed today in Babylon a remarkable set of clay tablets recording the minutes of the 1242 annual meeting of the Babylonical Statistical Association.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it.

Harold Hotelling
Harold Hotelling
Our knowledge, our attitudes, and our actions are based to a very large extent on samples.

Of course statistical graphics, just like statistical calculations, are only as good as what goes into them. An ill-specified or preposterous model or a puny data set cannot be rescued by a graphic (or by calculation), no matter how clever or fancy. A silly theory means a silly graphic.

Edward Tufte
Edward Tufte
I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone — the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.

By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.

Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
It was Karl Pearson, a man with an unquenchable ambition for scholarly recognition and the kind of drive and determination that had taken Hannibal over the Alps and Marco Polo to China, who recognized the power in Edgeworth's formulations of Galton's ideas. Pearson lacked Galton's originality and Edgeworth's depth of understanding, but it was his zeal, with a vital assist from G. Udny Yule, that created the methodology and sold it to the world.

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.

Bill James
Bill James
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.

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

As tasks become more varied and require greater training and skill, the relationship (between job attitudes and performance) appears to change progressively from the negative to positive.

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.

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

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

Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Hindsight supplements foresight: A view backward often adds materially to a view forward.

Only the strongest players can swim in the shark-infested waters of the Masters' Seas.

A time series is a sequence of observations, usually ordered in time, although in some cases the ordering may be according to another dimension. The feature of time series analysis which distinguishes it from other statistical analysis is the explicit recognition of the importance of the order in which the observations are made. While in many problems the observations are statistically independent, in time series successive observations may be dependent, and the dependence may depend on the positions in the sequence. The nature of a series and the structure of its generating process also may involve in other ways the sequence in which the observations are taken.

Theodore Wilbur Anderson
Theodore Wilbur Anderson