Tom Short's Index of Statistical Quotes and Song Lyrics
Statistical Quotes and Song Lyrics
Collected by Tom Short
"Bayesians in the Night",
related by Jeff Witmer, attributed to Bob Hogg
- H.G. Wells, 1929
-
"The time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete
initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide
states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute,
to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to
read and to write."
Sherlock Holmes
"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay."
Florence Nightingale
"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the
measure of His purpose."
O.Henry in "The Handbook of Hymen"
``Let us sit on this log at the roadside,'' says I, ``and forget the
inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns
of ascertained facts and legalized measures that beauty is to be found.
In this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson,'' says I, ``is statistics more
wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the
depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand years.
The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near Newcastle.
A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet eight inches deep will
hold a ton of coal. If an artery is cut, compress it above the wound. A
man's leg contains thirty bones. The Tower of London was burned in 1841.''
``Go on, Mr. Pratt,'' says Mrs. Sampson. ``Them ideas is so original and
soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be.''
Reported by Jeff Witmer - attributed to ?
"Someone who knows how will always have a job. They will work for someone who
knows why."
W. Hamilton, Cartoonist, 1995
"Wishing you all timeless skills."
Theodore Roosevelt at Central High School, Philadelphia, PA, November 22, 1902
"You are here to study, and while you are it, study hard. When you have got
the chance to play outside, play hard. Do not forget this, that in the long
run the man who shirks his work will shirk his play."
M.H. Doolittle, 1887
"Having given the number of instances respectively in which things are thus
and so, in which they are thus and not so, in which they are so and not thus,
and in which they are neither thus nor so, it is required to eliminate the
general quantitative relativity inhering in the mere thingness of the things,
and to determine the special quantitative relativity subsisting between the
thusness and the soness of the things."
Louis Pasteur
"In the field of observation, chance favors only the mind that is prepared."
Sherlock Holmes quoting Winwood Reade by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"... while man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a
mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one
man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be
up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the
statistician."