Christine Lagarde Quotes

We must never let a blizzard of statistics blind us to the real lives and people behind them.

Statistics and numbers are no good unless you have good people to analyse and then interpret their meaning and importance.

Since that time up until the present time, there have been progress, and changes all through the time. The changes have not come by themselves; these changes have come from the doings of everyone in the country.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

Behind every case there are individual people.

Surveys give us a way of finding out what people across the country are thinking.

The quality of the data and information of a social science, economics or government study is inversely proportional to its importance and social significance.

To understand God’s thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.

The specific experience with which economics and economic statistics are concerned always refers to the past. It is history, and as such does not provide knowledge about a regularity that will manifest itself also in the future.

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

Policy is about real people and real stories, and sometimes we forget that.

The role of first lady brings with it unique opportunities to help people across the country and around the world.

Try to understand that behind every headline, there are individuals, families, and communities.

If we just focus on stats, we're gonna eventually not have them.

The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.

A U.N. study claims the happiest country in the world is Switzerland. When asked why they're so happy, Swiss people couldn't answer because their hands were counting money and their mouths were full of chocolate.

Serious numbers will speak to us always.

I hope that my work helps people - that's the thing that drives me and keeps me going.

There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they've been ordered to leave the United States. Including large numbers of violent criminals, they won't take them back. So we say, OK, we'll keep them. Not going to happen with me, not going to happen with me.

I think that idealism is always there in America. It's a spirit that's been subverted lately, and sold down the river to the contractors, what with the privatizing of all aspects of the government. It's so cold and cynical - all dollars and cents and parcel it up and sell it out and downgrade it and outsource it. They don't consider what it does to people. I think the spirit of this country is finally coming back, and hopefully it will triumph.

Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph.

There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they've been ordered to leave the United States. Including large numbers of violent criminals, they won't take them back.

Them as counts counts moren them as dont count