Top 33 Statistical Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Statistical Quotes from famous people such as Nate Silver, Steven Pinker, Rudolph A. Marcus, Elizabeth Blackburn, Robert J. Shiller, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

When you get into statistical analysis, you don't reall

When you get into statistical analysis, you don’t really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by ‘The Onion’ – or be the subject of a cartoon in ‘The New Yorker.’ I guess I’m kind of an outlier there.
Nate Silver
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Steven Pinker
After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.
Rudolph A. Marcus
We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.
Elizabeth Blackburn
My very first publication was an estimator – this was a statistical procedure – a kind of invention. My father got a patent and started a business; it wasn’t successful, but maybe I have some of him in me.
Robert J. Shiller
Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.
Temple Grandin
An old friend of mine, an economist by trade, once explained to me that the statistical definition of ‘dilemma’ is 49.9% in favor and 50.1% against. If the gap is greater, there is no dilemma, because the answer is clear.
Yair Lapid
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
Richard Dawkins
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
Steve Jurvetson
I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I like to do projects in which you can see statistical results. I am very happy for all these small children, who have been the biggest group of victims of iodine deficiency.
Anatoly Karpov
Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University.
George Stigler
Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination… Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
Hannah Arendt
We need no elaborate statistical proof that trade depends on prosperity in the industrial countries.
Arthur Lewis
I’ve always been in good shape. I just sucked early in my career from a statistical perspective.
Jake Arrieta
None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I’m not saying that at all.
Bill James
There’s no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It’s next to impossible.
John W. Rogers, Jr.
By relying on the statistical information rather than a gut feeling, you allow the data to lead you to be in the right place at the right time. To remain as emotionally free from the hurly burley of the here and now is one of the only ways to succeed.
James O’Shaughnessy
When we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you’re doing when you wake up each day.
Tom Rath
Inch for inch, the 6-foot-3 Westbrook is the NBA’s most sensationally talented player, a relentlessly explosive basket-attacker with a deadly pull-up jumper – a top-10 NBA player by any big-picture statistical measure from Player Efficiency Rating to Win Shares.
Skip Bayless
I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.
Angus Deaton
If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That’s just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.
Richard Dawkins
If a player digests his own statistical information in his own time, on his own laptop, tablet or whatever, without a coach standing over him, it makes it easier for him. It helps with the pressure. There’s a fear factor but spending time at home analysing things can help control it.
Sam Allardyce
National data on evictions aren’t collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.
Matthew Desmond
Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.
David Einhorn
Bose-Einstein condensation is one of the most intriguing phenomena predicted by quantum statistical mechanics.
Wolfgang Ketterle
It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.
Werner Heisenberg
Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality – which indeed may be a rare achievement.
Michael Leunig
The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.
Lawrence Eagleburger
There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.
Ian Hart
There is a tendency in all of us to ask for better stat

There is a tendency in all of us to ask for better statistical performance. There is a tendency to impose quotas behind which usually lies imposition of pressure to achieve improved statistics.
Gordon B. Hinckley
We are going to completely change what it means to do advanced analytics with our data solutions. We have machine-learning stuff that is about really bringing advanced analytics and statistical machine learning into data-science departments everywhere.
Satya Nadella