John M. Broder Quotes

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

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

Only in the Orwellian world of double-speak employed by President Barack Obama and billionaire elitist Michael Bloomberg would nonsense be hailed as 'common sense.'

It's the oldest trick in Washington - when presented with a policy solution you don't like, characterize it as the bogeyman.

Public policy is designed by spin doctors who aim to keep our heads below the water. The public good is not a consideration, and their self-serving agendas prevail over common sense.

The statistics might have a Eurosceptic cast, but they are not exactly a fun read. Few of us want to wade through ONS graphs or European Commission tables.

Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking - so it's no wonder so many politicians thrive in it.

In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

To cover politics in Washington allows you to live in the very, very wide gap between what the actual truth is, and how people are trying to manipulate the truth. They speak in the language of spin, obsequiousness, obfuscation. The meta of politics is just this endless source of material that can shed light on the psychology of the process.

Ronald Reagan's legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them.

I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.

The nature of politics is to subtract meaning from language.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

Politics is the business of managing perceptions.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

Political thinking consists in deciding upon the conclusion first and then finding good arguments for it. An open mind is considered irresponsible.

Governments first decide on their interests and then seek the vocabulary most congenial to their policies.

What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

In order to govern you have to feed the news cycle

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.