Ronald Fisher Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.

Ronald Fisher
Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases — the second law of thermodynamics — holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.

Ronald Fisher
Critical tests of this kind may be called tests of significance, and when such tests are available we may discover whether a second sample is or is not significantly different from the first.

Ronald Fisher
Christian children should... be taught that faith does not mean credulity; but is a quality, very like courage, which makes one hold fast to that which is good.

Ronald Fisher
The academic mind, as we know, is sometimes capable of assuming an aggressive attitude. The official mind, on the contrary, is and has to be, expert in the art of self-defence.

Ronald Fisher
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

Ronald Fisher
However, perhaps the main point is that you are under no obligation to analyse variance into its parts if it does not come apart easily, and its unwillingness to do so naturally indicates that one's line of approach is not very fruitful.

Ronald Fisher
[...] the uncontrolled causes which may influence the result are always strictly innumerable.

Ronald Fisher
To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.

Ronald Fisher
After all, it is a common weakness of young authors to put too much into their papers.

Ronald Fisher
Apart from sex linkage, we know almost nothing at present of linkage in man. Yet it is certain that every defect determined by a single factor must be located in one or other of twenty-three [sic] linkage groups. Each defect must therefore be linked in inheritance with numerous other observable traits, and with some of them is probably linked closely. The search for such linkage will certainly be lengthy, and at first, disappointing.

Ronald Fisher
The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Ronald Fisher
In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the null hypothesis, and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

Ronald Fisher
No efforts of mine could avail to make the book easy reading.

Ronald Fisher
Fairly large print is a real antidote to stiff reading.

Ronald Fisher
Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.

Ronald Fisher