Thomas J. Sargent Quotes

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

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

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

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

Obviously it's a statistics game.

Statistics are there to be broken.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

I think the biggest problem in clinical trials is that they are underpowered. And that fundamentally, the studies are just too small.

One of the biggest and most important tools of theoretical physics is the wastebasket.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

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

… scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects.

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

Stats are for losers. They relish in them.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

I have never been a stats person.

Being a skeptical and thoughtful consumer of polls is essential.

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

If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.