Statistician Quotes

To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of. (Ronald Fisher)
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. View quote
E. M. Forster
Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either. View quote
Evan Esar
Every time I sit with our general manager at a baseball game, and there's number-cruncher and statistician guy - I'm sitting around - they start talking about stuff, and I say, 'What's that? I've never heard of that one before.' View quote
George Brett
The concerns of fiction, let it be said, are not those of a statistician - or of a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, "What do people think?"; the PR man asks, "What will people think?" View quote
Philip Roth
It is not necessary to think of gambling places; the statistician who applies statistical tests is engaged in a dignified sort of gambling, and in his case the distribution of the random variables changes from occasion to occasion. View quote
William Feller
Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides - that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist - but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development. View quote
Edwin Grant Conklin
No scientist is as model minded as is the statistician; in no other branch of science is the word model as often and consciously used as in statistics. View quote
Hans Freudenthal
No statistician present at this moment will have been in doubt about the meaning of my words when I mentioned the common statistical model. It must be a stochastic device producing random results. Tossing coins or a dice or playing at cards are not flexible enough. The most general chance instrument is the urn filled with balls of different colours or with tickets bearing some ciphers or letters. This model is continuously used in our courses as a didactic tool, and in our statistical analyses as a means of translating realistic problems into mathematical ones. In statistical language " urn model " is a standard expression. View quote
Hans Freudenthal
The future mathematical statistician needs early contacts with experimental sciences. He needs them because, at this stage of the development of statistics, the expeimental sciences are sources of theoretical problems. Also, he needs them because in almost any imaginable job which he may get after graduation, he will be called upon to apply his theory to experimental or observational problems. View quote
Jerzy Neyman
The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician... This might sound like a heretical point of view for those of us who grew up believing the essential American myth that we could become anything we wanted. it's clear from [our] research that each person has greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to human development is building on who you already are. (Tom Rath)
In India, there's lack of appreciation of the need to cross-examine data, the responsibility of a statistician. View quote
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Truth may be found in the heart of a philosopher but seldom in the figures of a statistician; it is far too delicate a thing to be pinned down to columns of numbers on ruled paper. View quote
Louis Bromfield
I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors. View quote
Lloyd deMause
I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science). View quote
Lloyd deMause
These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry. View quote
Muriel Rukeyser