W. Allen Wallis Quotes

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

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

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

Whether baseball or football, we're tasked in front offices with making decisions under uncertainty. How do you corral that uncertainty in a way to make more consistently better decisions? That's very similar.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

I am not very good at statistics. I am also a poor thinker.

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

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

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.

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

I'm not too worried about stats and stuff like that.

Probability is the very guide of life.

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 began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

[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.

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.

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.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

It is not surprising that in talking about uncertainty we should lean heavily on facts, just as the court of law does when interrogating witnesses. Facts form a sort of bedrock on which we can build the shifting sands of uncertainty.

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.