Francis Galton Quotes

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.

Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go and informed by fairly good judgment.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

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

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

Statistics is the grammar of science.

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.

Statistics is the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science and of every art: the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organization based on experience, for it only gives results of our experience.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

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

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

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] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.

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.

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

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

Statistics are like blood sausage: they are delicious until you find out how they're made.

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