Statistician Quotes

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.

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

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.

The process of evolution on this earth, so far as we can judge, has been carried out neither with intelligence nor truth, but entirely through the routine of various sequences, commonly called "laws," established or necessitated we know not how.

The most notable difference (of the American character) lies in the psychology of work. In the Orient one works to live; in Europe one works to consume; in America one works to work. These are the three stages of a progressive evolution.

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

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

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.

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.

Are we probabilists, believers, or fuzzifiers?

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

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

Walter A. Shewhart

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Italy is, after France and perhaps in the same degree, the land in which love of country has the deepest roots in the hearts of its inhabitants. The fact is that perhaps nowhere else has nature been so prodigal with its enchantments and seductions. Therefore, although Italy has been, since the fall of the Caesars, the object of European covetousness, the eternal battlefield of powerful neighbors, and the theatre of the fiercest and most prolonged civil wars, her children have always refused to leave her. Save for some commercial colonies hastily thrown upon the shores of Asia by Genoa and Venice, history has not, in fact, recorded in Italy any important outward movement of population.

If mathematics is a game, there is no reason why people should play it if they do not want to. With football, it belongs to those amusements without which life would be endurable.

Lancelot Hogben

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

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

Frederick Mosteller

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.

Stephen Stigler

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

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

Victor Niederhoffer