Martha Gellhorn Quotes

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

People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

I think that having good data, good statistics-and the United States generally has better macroeconomic statistics than most countries-and having good economists to interpret those data and present the policy alternatives, has a substantially beneficial effect on policymaking in the United States.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

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

If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That's the kind of thing that I love to do.

We're all fascinated by the numbers, as we were about the 100 points.

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

At the end of the day, the numbers that we're hearing are not going to be totally correct or not correct at all.

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom…

Numbers are not liberal or conservative. Adjectives are partisan, not numbers.

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

The numbers are hard to control.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

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

I've got a lot of stats. I did a lot of stuff.

We are drowning in information.

I have never been a stats person.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.