Some cynicism
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The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them,
add them, raise them to the n-th power, take the cube root and prepare
wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures
comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what
he damn pleases.
Comment of an English judge on the subject of Indian
statistics; Quoted in Sir Josiah Stamp in Some Economic Matters in
Modern Life, London: King and Sons, 1929, pp. 258-259.
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There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you
make up
Rex Stout
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Statistics are like alienists-they will testify for either side
F.H.
La Guardia
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You may prove anything by figures.
Thomas Carlyle
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You cannot feed the hungry on statistics
David Lloyd George
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A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph
Stalin (1879-1953)
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A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save
himself from having ignorance foisted upon him
Thomas Carlyle
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Do not put faith in what statistics say until you have
carefully considered what they do not say.
William W. Watt
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Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
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Statistics are figures used as arguments.
Leonard L. Levison
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Figures won't lie but liars will figure.
Charles Grosvenor
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I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to
digest. The only one I can remember is that if all the people who go to sleep
in church were laid end to end they would be a lot more comfortable.
Mrs
Robert A.Taft
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Statistician: Delphic figure who lacks the necessary vocabulary to
converse with mere mortals.
Rod Nicolson - Psychology Software News
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Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as
you please. (Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.)
Mark
Twain
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Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating,
very few survive.
Wallace Irwin (1875-1959)
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"Give us a copper, Guv" said the beggar to the Treasury statistician,
when he waylaid him in Parliament square. Ï haven't eaten for three days."
Äh," said the statistician, Änd how does that compare with the same period
last year?"
Russell Lewis
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Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a
private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from
non-practitioners.
G. O. Ashley
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The masses seem to me worthy of notice in only three respects: first as
blurred copies of great men, produced on bad paper with worn plates, further
as a resistance to the great, and finally as the tools of the great; beyond
that, may the devil and statistics take them.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
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Statistical Analysis: Mysterious, sometimes bizarre, manipulations
performed upon the collected data of an experiment in order to obscure the
fact that the results have no generalizable meaning for humanity. Commonly,
computers are used, lending an additional aura of unreality to the
proceedings.
Unknown
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I could prove God statistically.
George Gallup
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The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is
suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends.
If they're okay, then it's you.
Rita Mae Brown
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"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There
was truth, and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against
the whole world, you were not mad. 'Sanity is not statistical.'"
G. Orwell,
1984
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There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and
statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
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Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than on all other
days of the year put together. This proves, by the numbers left in
stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the
country has grown so.
Mark Twain
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I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The
first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate
of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was
Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political
statistic.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
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Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
Fletcher Knebel
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I can prove anything by statistics except the truth
George Canning (c.
1826)