What is your favorite statistical quote?
This is community wiki, so please one quote per answer.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. (George E. P. Box)
Reference: Box & Draper (1987), Empirical model-building and response surfaces, Wiley, p. 424.
Also: G.E.P. Box (1979), "Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building" in Robustness in Statistics (Launer & Wilkinson eds.), p. 202.
"An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem." -- John Tukey
"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."
-- Ronald Fisher (1938)
The quotation can be read on page 17 of the article.
R. A. Fisher. Presidential Address by Professor R. A. Fisher, Sc.D., F.R.S. Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933-1960), Vol. 4, No. 1 (1938), pp. 14-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40383882
87% of statistics are made up on the spot
-Unknown
Dilbert.com [1]
[1] http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/In God we trust. All others must bring data.
(W. Edwards Deming)
Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.
-- George Box
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
-Aaron Levenstein
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
-- Niels Bohr
If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.
--Ronald Coase (quoted from Coase, R. H. 1982. How should economists chose? American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D. C.). I think most who hear this quote misunderstand its profound message against data dredging.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
Mark Twain
A big computer, a complex algorithm and a long time does not equal science.
-- Robert Gentleman
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.
--H.G. Wells
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data
Tukey
There are no routine statistical questions, only questionable statistical routines.
D.R. Cox
Statistics - A subject which most statisticians find difficult but which many physicians are experts on. "Stephen S. Senn"
He uses statistics like a drunken man uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.
-- Andrew Lang
Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring.
-- Charlie Chan [1]
[1] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200691.txtA nice one I came about:
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
By Richard Feynman ( link [1])
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1tKEvN3DF0The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.
-- John Tukey
(This is MY favourite Tukey quote)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
– Martin Rees [1] ( Wikipedia [2])
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Rees"It's easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them."
-- Frederick Mosteller
Tout le monde y croit cependant, me disait un jour M. Lippmann, car les expérimentateurs s'imaginent que c'est un théorème de mathématiques, et les mathématiciens que c'est un fait expérimental.
Henri Poincaré, Calcul des probabilités (2nd ed., 1912), p. 171.
In English:
Everybody believes in the exponential law of errors [i.e., the Normal distribution]: the experimenters, because they think it can be proved by mathematics; and the mathematicians, because they believe it has been established by observation.
Whittaker, E. T. and Robinson, G. "Normal Frequency Distribution." Ch. 8 in The Calculus of Observations: A Treatise on Numerical Mathematics [1], 4th ed. New York: Dover, pp. 164-208, 1967. p. 179.
Quoted at Mathworld.com [2].
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=PlEjcAAACAAJ&dq=The+Calculus+of+Observations:+An+Introduction+to+Numerical+Analysis&hl=en&ei=5CrXTLPsMoGBlAfR2fH8CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAASay you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable.
-Bobby Bragan, 1963
I don't know about famous, but the following is one of my favourites:
Conducting data analysis is like drinking a fine wine. It is important to swirl and sniff the wine, to unpack the complex bouquet and to appreciate the experience. Gulping the wine doesn’t work.
-Daniel B. Wright (2003), see PDF of Article [1].
Reference: Wright, D. B. (2003). Making friends with your data: Improving how statistics are conducted and reported1. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 73(1), 123-136.
[1] http://www.baomee.info/pdf/MakeFriends/1.pdfMy greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'
Claude Elwood Shannon
... surely, God loves the .06 nearly as much as the .05. Can there be any doubt that God views the strength of evidence for or against the null as a fairly continuous function of the magnitude of p? (p.1277)
Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R. (1989). Statistical procedures and the justification of knowledge in psychological science. American Psychologist, 44(10), 1276-1284. pdf [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140330070045/http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Emaccoun/PP279_Rosnow.pdfOn two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different---in some decimal place---for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.
Tukey (again but this one is my favorite)
The subjectivist (i.e. Bayesian) states his judgements, whereas the objectivist sweeps them under the carpet by calling assumptions knowledge, and he basks in the glorious objectivity of science.
I.J. Good
Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.
-- Winston Churchill
This is unlikely to be a popular quote, but anyway,
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Ernest Rutherford
"Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
- Terry Pratchett [1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/95458-scientists-have-calculated-that-the-chances-of-something-so-patentlyThose who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.
-- Brad Efron
Figures don't lie, but liars do figure
--Mark Twain
The plural of anecdote is not data.
-- Roger Brinner
(in the context of Anecdotal_evidence [1])
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence…the statistician knows…that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world.
George Box (JASA, 1976, Vol. 71, 791-799)
"The first time I was in a statistics course, I was there to teach it"
John Tukey ( link [1])
[1] http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~brill/Papers/life.pdfThe death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
-- Kurt Tucholsky, in: Französischer Witz, 1925
"It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without statistics." - Andrejs Dunkels
"To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.”
Box, Hunter, and Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters (1978).
I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I'm not kidding.
Hal Varian [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_VarianWe are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.
Rutherford D. Roger
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.
-- John Tukey
The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.
-– Sir Ronald A. Fisher
"The Central Limit Theorem is about the journey and the Strong Law of Large Numbers is about the destination." stats.SE user cardinal in a comment on this question [1]
[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/49123/6633Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.
xkcd [1]
[1] http://xkcd.com/552/There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
-- probably: Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911). [1]
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics60% of the time, it works every time.
-Brian Fantana
My thesis is simply this: probability does not exist. - Bruno de Finetti
The primary product of a research inquiry is one or more measures of effect size, not p values.
Cohen, J. (1990). Things I have learned (so far) [1]. American Psychologist, 45, 1304-1312.
[1] http://www.cps.nova.edu/marker/whatIhavelearnedsofarcohen.pdfWhile the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
Arthur Conan Doyle
"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence."
Often attributed to Carl Sagan, but he was paraphrasing sceptic Marcello Truzzi. Doubtless the concept is even more ancient.
David Hume said, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence".
One could argue this is not a quote about statistics. However, applied statistics is ultimately in the business of evaluating the quality of evidence for or against some proposition.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Mark Twain (okay, so he's not a statistician)
This one is brand new, and Allen Wilcox is an epidemiologist, not a statistician, but whatever, I'm running with it.
Data do not speak for themselves - they need context, and they need skeptical evaluation
If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.
-Albert Einstein
I acknowledge that Einstein wasn't a statistician. However, Michael Friendly uses this quote in arguing for a greater role for visualizations in data analysis. I share that goal, and I think the quote works nicely.
An ecologist is a statistician who likes to be outside.
-- apparently a good friend of Murray Cooper [1].
[1] http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Why-software-fails-in-scientific-research-td1573062.html#a2275423This is my favourite:
"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”
by Ashleigh Brilliant
May I add this one, because I like Jan's contributions to psychometrics and statistics...
[1] http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/Causal interpretation of the results of regression analysis of observational data is a risky business. The responsibility rests entirely on the shoulders of the researcher, because the shoulders of the statistical technique cannot carry such strong inferences.
Jan de Leeuw, homepage [1]
The Earth is round. p < .05
Jacob Cohen
When I see articles with lots of significance tests, I say that the statisticians are p-ing on the research.
Herman Friedmann (by recollection, he said this in class)
Found in Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation [1] by Peter Norvig
Most of the time, when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you have screwed up the experiment
(Michael Wigler)
in the sense of
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
(Carl Sagan)
which is based on a similar quote by Pierre Laplace
[1] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.htmlIt would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable
~ Spock, "The Enterprise Incident",stardata 5027.3
I just can't help myself, this is a provocative quote from E. T. Jaynes:
Many of us have already explored the road you are following, and we know what you will find at the end of it. It doesn't matter how many new words you drag into the discussion to avoid having to utter the word 'probability' in a sense different from frequency: likelihood, confidence, significance, propensity, support, credibility, acceptability, indifference, consonance, tenability; and so on, until the resources of the good Dr Roget are exhausted. All of these are attempts to represent degrees of plausibility by real numbers, and they are covered automatically by Cox's theorems. It doesn't matter which approach you happen to like philosophically; by the time you have made your methods fully consistent, you will be forced, kicking and screaming, back to the ones given by Laplace. Until you have achieved mathematical equivalence with Laplace's methods, it will be possible, by looking in specific problems with Galileo's magnification, to exhibit the defects in your methods.
Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.
--Tukey
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
George Bernard Shaw
Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.
~Gregg Easterbrook
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
-- Von Neumann
"...a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data."
E.T. Jaynes
preamble: There is even a class of user now days who sees the significance stars rather like the gold stars my grandson sometimes gets on his homework:
Three solid gold (significance) stars on the main effects will do very nicely, thank you, and if there are a few little stars here and there on the interactions, so much the better!
W.N. Venables
[1] http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS3/Exegeses.pdf"Taking a model too seriously is really just another way of not taking it seriously at all."
By Andrew Gelman
"Statistics is exciting because you get to play with others' data while telling them their research is crap."
Stephen J. Senn ( Source [1])
[1] https://twitter.com/stephensenn/status/489741383096631297Everybody is a Bayesian. It's just that some know it, and some don't. - Trivellore Raghunathan
Don't think -- use the computer.
Attributed ("tongue in cheek," just to make sure we understand the intent) to "G. Dyke." Quoted in Phillip I. Good and James W. Hardin, Common Errors in Statistics [1]: see the very first page of Part I.
A "G. Dyke" is cited in the bibliography as the author of How to avoid bad statistics. Field Crops Res. 1997; 51: 165-197. This apparently is George Dyke, who later in the book is quoted more at length:
The availability of 'user-friendly' statistical software has caused authors to become increasingly careless about the logic of interpreting their results, and to rely uncritically on computer output, often using the 'default option' when something a little different (usually, but not always, a little more complicated) is correct, or at least more appropriate.
[Cited on pp 71-72 in the first edition, 2003.]
A related quotation graces the beginning of Chapter 7:
[1] http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/17/04717943/0471794317.pdfCut out the appropriate part of the computer output and paste it onto the draft of the paper.
Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai. [1]
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/from-height-of-this-place.html"If you think that statistics has nothing to say about what you do or how you could do it better, then you are either wrong or in need of a more interesting job." - Stephen Senn (Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health, Cambridge University Press, 2003)
"New methods always look better than old ones. Neural nets are better than logistic regression, support vector machines are better than neural nets, etc." - Brad Efron
In the long run, we're all dead.
-- John Maynard Keynes.
A reference to survival analysis?!
[1] http://www.edwardtufte.comAt their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning.
Edward Tufte, www.edwardtufte.com [1]
"After 17 years of interacting with physicians, I have come to realize that many of them are adherents of a religion they call Statistics... Like any good religion, it involves vague mysteries capable of contradictory and irrational interpretation. It has a priesthood and a class of mendicant friars. And it provides Salvation: Proper invocation of the religious dogmas of Statistics will result in publication in prestigious journals."
David S. Salsburg [1] (author of The Lady Tasting Tea), quoted at " Pithypedia [2]".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_SalsburgOne sees, from this Essay, that the theory of probabilities is basically just common sense reduced to calculus; it makes one appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it.
Another one from Laplace
With three constants, I can fit a dog. With four, I can make it bark.
Attributed to William Reifsnyder [1], in a personal communication to me. Unfortunately I can't find a reference on the 'web.
[1] http://bill.reifsnyder.net/Statistics is the grammar of science - Karl Pearson
The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.
-- James Clerk Maxwell
All information looks like noise until you break the code.
Hiro in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)
There is no free hunch.
-- Robert Abelson
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206
Not quite from a statistician, but I nonetheless like to quote this one in lectures. It nicely sums up what we as data analysts do.
"What the use of a p-value implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred."
Harold Jeffreys (Theory of Probability)
The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.
by R.A. Fisher
“There are two things you are better off not watching in the making: sausages and econometric estimates.” - Edward Leamer [1]
The quote comes from:
Leamer, Edward E, 1983. "Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics," [2] American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(1), pages 31-43, March.
And he also says it, in spoken word, on this EconTalk podcast [3] hosted by Russ Roberts.
[1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/edward.leamer/"When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math. If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics." - Karl Broman
efficiency = statistical efficiency x usage.
-- John Tukey
A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.
-- M.J. Moroney
A bit obscure this one, but a great quote about subjective probability:
... There is no way, however, in which the individual can avoid the burden of responsibility for his own evaluations. The key cannot be found that will unlock the enchanted garden wherein, among the fairy-rings and the shrubs of magic wands, beneath the trees laden with monads and noumena, blossom forth the flowers of probabilitas realis. With these fabulous blooms safely in our button-holes we would be spared the necessity of forming opinions, and the heavy loads we bear upon our necks would be rendered superflous once and for all.
Bruno de Finetti, Theory of Probability, Vol 2
A man who ‘rejects’ a hypothesis provisionally, as a matter of habitual practice, when the significance is at the 1% level or higher, will certainly be mistaken in not more than 1% of such decisions. For when the hypothesis is correct he will be mistaken in just 1% of these cases, and when it is incorrect he will never be mistaken in rejection. [...] However, the calculation is absurdly academic, for in fact no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects hypotheses; he rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his evidence and his ideas.
-- Sir Ronald A. Fisher, from Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference (1956)
Another quote as a commentary: "This passage clearly is intended as a criticism of Neyman and Pearson, although again their names are not mentioned. However, these authors never recommended a fixed level of significance that would be used in all cases. [...] Thus Fisher rather incongruously appears to be attacking his own past position rather than that of Neyman and Pearson" (from Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics by Erich Lehmann, section 4.5).
'Figures fool when fools figure'.
Henry Oliver Lancaster
"A frequentist is a person whose long-run ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time."
Unknown.
Bayesians address the question everyone is interested in by using assumptions no-one believes, while frequentists use impeccable logic to deal with an issue of no interest to anyone
Louis Lyons
These days the statistician is often asked such questions as "Are you a Bayesian?" "Are you a frequentist?" "Are you a data analyst?" "Are you a designer of experiments?". I will argue that the appropriate answer to ALL of these questions can be (and preferably should be) "yes", and that we can see why this is so if we consider the scientific context for what statisticians do.
--G.E.P. Box
9 out of ten dentists think the 10th dentist is an idiot.
To understand God's Thoughts we must study statistics for these are the measure of His purpose.
--Florence Nightingale
The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.
George Box
[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the science of man.
-- Sir Francis Galton [1]
[1] http://galton.org/The probability is like the stick used by the blind man to feel his way. If he could see, he would not need the cane, just as if we knew which horse runs faster, then we would not need probability theory.
Stanislaw Lem
The roll of the dice will never abolish chance
Written in 1897 by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) , a famous French poet - In French :
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard
Context: An F-test is often a poor way to justify pooling, because F-test is not robust against non-normality.
"To make a preliminary test on variances is rather like putting to sea in a rowing boat to find out whether conditions are sufficiently calm for an ocean liner to leave port." (G.E.P. Box, "Non-normality and tests on variances",
Source: Biometrika, 40 (1953), pp 318-335, quote on page 333; via from Moore & McCabe.
(props to Tim Hesterberg: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-February/154856.html)
People think that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart. Bradley Efron
Uncertainty is a personal matter; it is not the uncertainty but your uncertainty. (Dennis Lindley)
Reference: Dennis Victor Lindley [1] (2006), Understanding Uncertainty, Wiley-Interscience, p. 1.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dennis_Lindley"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may be cast." - Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519
Found here [1].
[1] http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/A quote from Karl Pearson:
The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material
I think of statistics as, essentially, the methodology of science, so that's how I interpret this quote.
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." albert einstein
You may be too vague to be wrong and that's really bad cause that's just obscuring the issue.
Bruce Sterling
"I cannot conceal the fact here that in the [application of probability theory], I foresee many things happening which can cause one to be badly mistaken if he does not proceed cautiously.",
Bernoulli (1713) (via ET Jaynes)
"A statistician is someone who knows what to assume to be Gaussian"
Dikran Marsupial (2009) (not famous yet ;o).
Everybody knows that probability and statistics are the same thing, and statistics is nothing but correlation. Now the correlation is just the cosine of an angle, thus all is trivial.
-- Emil Artin, according to Kai Lai Chung in Elementary probability theory [1] (right, Artin might not been known primarily as a statistician)
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=safNnEOICL8CThe researcher armed with a confidence interval, but deprived of the false respectability of statistical significance, must work harder to convince himself and others of the importance of his findings. This can only be good.
Michael Oakes, Statistical inference: A commentary for the social and behavioural sciences (NY: Wiley, 1986)
"The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the processes he applies or recommends." -- Sir Ronald A. Fisher in The Design of Experiments (1935)
The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal thruths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of physical universe
-- Karl Pearson
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
~ Hillaire Belloc in The Silence of the Sea
We statisticians, as a police of science (a label some dislike but I am proud of...), have the fundamental duty of helping others to engage in statistical thinking as a necessary step of scientific inquiry and evidence-based policy formulation. In order to truly fulfill this task, we must constantly firm up and deepen our own foundation, and resist the temptation of competing for “methods and results” without pondering deeply whether we are helping others or actually harming them by effectively encouraging more false discoveries or misguided policies. Otherwise, we indeed can lose our identity, no matter how much we are desired or feared now.
Xiao-Li Meng
“Statistics is much like a streetlight. Not very enlightening, but nice for supporting you”
Storm P [1]
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robert_Storm_Petersen#QuotesWe may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Also known as Laplace's demon
Statistics' real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical.
Steve Vardeman and Max Morris
Good statistics involves principled argument that conveys an interesting and credible point.
-- Robert P. Abelson, (1995) "Statistics as Principled Argument"
We left in our mathematical model a gap for the exercise of a more intuitive process of personal judgement
-- Egon Pearson, quoted in Abelson (1995).
"One death is a tragedy, 100,000 deaths are statistics."
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
"If you put a buttock on a hot plate and another one on an ice cube, the average is good, but in reality your bottom is in trouble."
Grigore Moisil [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigore_MoisilNot really about statistics, but works perfectly:
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." (Henri Poincaré)
Not yet famous, but could become so.
"If a problem can not be tackled nonparametrically, it is dangerous to tackle it parametrically. But on the other hand, if it can be tackled nonparametrically, it would be better to tackle it parametrically." -- Sir David Cox
Statistics - past, present and future, Royal Statistical Society 180th Anniversary Lecture [1] near 16:27.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRik3vOKLcUThe Median Isn't the Message
-- Stephen Jay Gould [1]
[1] http://cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.htmlNo statistican, but useful for the profession:
The perfect is the enemy of the good - Voltaire
CauseWeb [1] has a collection of statistics quotations. Many have already been repeated here, but it has plenty that haven't yet been quoted, such as
"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."
(Falsely attributed to Sir Winston Churchill.) For the rest, follow the CauseWeb links to Resources->Fun->Quote.
[1] http://www.causeweb.org/Check out " Statistician's Blues [1]" by Todd Snider who is an alternative-country singer-songwriter. Warning, if you are sensitive to "bad" words, don't listen to the song. If you have a good or perhaps twisted sense of humor you will enjoy.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject. He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician".
(Sherlock Holmes speaking to Dr. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of the Four")
A table without stars is like champagne without bubbles! - David Giles [1]
[1] http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2013/04/star-wars.htmlData analysis is simply a dialogue with the data
--Stephen F. Gull, 1994
Many folks know only enough statistics to be dangerous. From Statistics for Dummies II - Deborah Rumsey
A variation on the Fisher quotation given here [1] is
Hiring a statistician after the data have been collected is like hiring a physician when your patient is in the morgue. He may be able to tell you what went wrong, but he is unlikely to be able to fix it.
But I heard this attributed to Box, not Fisher.
[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes/739#739Do not make things easy for yourself by speaking or thinking of data as if they were different from what they are; and do not go off from facing data as they are, to amuse your imagination by wishing they were different from what they are. Such wishing is pure waste of nerve force, weakens your intellectual power, and gets you into habits of mental confusion.
--Mary Everest Boole
It's not really about statistics, but I think it applies to statistics:
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle
[1] http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/fundamental_glossary_higgs_broadcast-85365[T]he p-value is the probability of obtaining data at least as extreme as the ones observed, if the null hypothesis is true. This is a world apart from saying that it is the probability of the null hypothesis being true, given that you observed that extreme data! Beware! If your ability on the long jump puts you in the 99.99% percentile, that does not mean that you are a kangaroo, and neither can one infer that the probability that you belong to the human race is 0.01%. - Tomasso Dorigo [1]
An argument over the meaning of words is a matter of law, an argument grounded in empirical data and quantitative estimates is an argument about science.
~ Razib Khan (though he is not a statistician or famous)
Perhaps not overly famous among statisticians but reduced-form econometricians will know it well:
If you can't see the causal relation of interest in the reduced form, it's probably not there.
Angrist and Krueger (2001) [1]
[1] http://economics.mit.edu/files/18Statistics without science is incomplete, science without statistics is imperfect.
K.V. Mardia
An intense preoccupation with the latest minutiae and indifference to the social and intellectual forces of tradition and revolutionary change, combine to produce the Mandarinism that some would now say already characterizes academic statistical theory and is most likely to describe its immediate future.
The statisticians of the past came into the subject from other fields - astronomy, pure mathematics, genetics, agronomy, economics etc. — and created their statistical methodology with a background of training for a specific scientific discipline and a feeling for its current needs. So for the future I recommend we work on interesting problems and avoid dogmatism.
-- Herbert Robbins in "Wither Mathematical Statistics?" as quoted by Peter J. Huber in "Speculations on the Path of Statistics".
Robbins, Herbert. "Wither Mathematical Statistics?" Advances in Applied Probability 7 (1975): 116-21. doi:10.2307/1426316.
Brillinger, D. R., L. T. Fernholz, and S. Morgenthaler, eds. The Practice of Data Analysis: Essays in Honor of John W. Tukey. Princeton University Press, 1997. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zthdd.
In his Fisher lecture, Box defines mathematistry as
the development of theory for theory's sake, which, since it seldom touches down with practice, has a tendency to redefine the problem rather than solve it. Typically, there has once been a statistical problem with scientific relevance but this has long since been lost sight of.
He also defines cookbookery as
The tendency to force all problems into the molds of one or two routine techniques, insufficient thought being given to the real objectives of the investigation or to the relevance of the assumptions implied by the imposed methods.
References
Box, G. E. P. 1976. Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71: 791–799.
Roderick J. Little (2013) In Praise of Simplicity not Mathematistry! Ten Simple Powerful Ideas for the Statistical Scientist, Journal of the American Statistical Association
A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
~ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839) ch. 2
...Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress.
--George Box 1992
This is a two part quote I've heard a few times:
Machine learning is statistics minus any checking of models and assumptions.
Brian D. Ripley
In that case, maybe we should get rid of checking of models and assumptions more often. Then maybe we'd be able to solve some of the problems that the machine learning people can solve but we can't!
Andrew Gelman
Link [1] (Ripley is quoted as making the statement at the useR forum, Gelman responds to the quote on his blog).
There's some irony in the sides taken by these two statisticians in this conversation. That is, some of Brian Ripley's early work was on Neural Networks, which is an extremely popular topic in Machine Learning, where as Andrew Gelman is exclusively known for Bayesian statistics in which he advocates taking one's statistical models very seriously.
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2008/12/03/machine_learnin/A statistical procedure is not an automatic, mechanical truth-generating machine
Meehl (1992) [1]
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00269.x?casa_token=2l_YQCsYdGkAAAAA:gx5oof309naI5T-4I6LY2Iu24QtyNe9-rhY1gfr4C6wQtjHX3XrHFknhkXsZ7Cjh-NWcuEc_iPi_Qe0The problem of modern day governments is that they try to get more than half the people above the median levels of income, health, happiness, education etc.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf
The Government are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the chowkidar (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases [ link [1]].
-- Josiah Stamp, recounting a story from Harold Cox, Some Economic Factors in Modern Life (1929), p. 258.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Statistics#QuotesYou complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.
-- Florence Nightingale, fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, pioneer in data visualization and founder of modern nursing
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton