Marilyn vos Savant Quotes

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

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

You know, I think I'm the worst player to talk to about statistics.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

Stats are for losers. They relish in them.

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They 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.

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

The type of measure used placed constraints on which statistics can be used.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

I've never been a stat guy.

Serious numbers will speak to us always.

[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.

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . . .

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

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."

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.