Michael Bloomberg Quotes

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.

Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.

Do not speculate; get data and calculate.

It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate is how you think about information that's presented in front of you. I think that's the great challenge. You have people who believe they do know how to think about the information, but don't, and they're in the position of power and legislation. You can't base a society on non-objectively verifiable truth. Otherwise, it's a fantasy land and science is the pathway to those emerging truths that are hard-earned and that some have taken decades, if not centuries, to emerge from experiments all around the world.

I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are.

Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

More frightening than any particular beliefs or policies is an utter lack of any sense of a need to test those beliefs and policies against hard evidence. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts, but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

I take what I see work. I'm a strict believer in the scientific principle of believing nothing, only taking the best evidence available at the present time, interpreting it as best you can, and leaving your mind open to the fact that new evidence will appear tomorrow.

Always believe what you see - with your own eyes, that is. Always believe what you see. That's the best way to go about this business. I've heard a lot of things about a lot of people, and it was never true.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.

You've accepted a lot of things without evidence. Find out what the evidence is for that. Find out what the evidence is for everything that you accept.