Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

We have an expression in New York City government - "In God we trust, but for everyone else, bring data." It's so easy to pick up a sound byte and say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that," without really thinking.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.

Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.

Facts and data, rather than opinion, are the two cornerstones of problem solving, and yet they are consistently withheld from the people by American media. We must have facts and data in order to recognize where there is a problem!

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

We shouldn't accept things just because somebody says so.

I've always been a believer in research. It's great to have an instinctual human reaction to a character, too, of course, but it has to be countered with knowledge and understanding.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

Don't believe everything you read.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.

I am a writer and editor with a passion for true storytelling. To me, science matters, research matters and knowledge matters, whatever the field.

One of the first things we should teach every student is not to believe everything they read and hear.

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right. If you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.