On Statistics (Unsourced)

"A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him." (Thomas Carlyle)

"According to the statistics, a man eats a prune every twenty seconds. I don't know who this fellow is, but I know where to find him." (Morey Amsterdam)

"All do statistics, some on paper, some by memory. Those who fail take care to give no statistics. Among those who succeed or think they have succeeded are some of small or accidental experience." (Florence Nightingale)

"Always expect to find at least one error when you proofread your own statistics. If you don’t, you are probably making the same mistake twice." (Cheryl Russell)

"But law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. Law brings us continually back to God instead of carrying us away from him." (Florence Nightingale) 

"Do not put faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say." (William W Watt)

"Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself." (Winston Churchill)

"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable." (Mark Twain)

"General impressions are never to be trusted. Unfortunately when they are of long standing they become fixed rules of life and assume a prescriptive right not to be questioned. Consequently those who are not accustomed to original inquiry entertain a hatred and horror of statistics. They cannot endure the idea of submitting sacred impressions to cold-blooded verification. But it is the triumph of scientific men to rise superior to such superstitions, to desire tests by which the value of beliefs may be ascertained, and to feel sufficiently masters of themselves to discard contemptuously whatever may be found untrue." (Sir Francis Galton)

" I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. So economic models — how any model by definition isn't right. When someone just says, 'Oh, your model is wrong.' That's not much of an insight. What you want to know is, is wrong in important ways or wrong in ways that are less relevant? And you want to know what does the data really say about the model?" (Lars Peter Hansen) 

"If a man stands with his left foot on a hot stove and his right foot in a refrigerator, the statistician would say that, on the average, he’s comfortable." (Walter Heller)

"I can prove anything by statistics except the truth." (George Canning)

"If the statistics are boring, you've got the wrong numbers." (Edward Tufte)

"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." (Ernest Rutherford)

"In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies." (Stephen Leacock)

"In general, it is necessary to have some data on which to calculate probabilities. [...] Statisticians do not evolve probabilities out of their inner consciousness, they merely calculate them." (Leonard C Tippett)

"It is easy to lie with statistics, but easier to lie without them [...]" (Frederick Mosteller)

"It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it." (Andrejs Dunkels)

"It is thus that statistics reveals more and more the inconstancy and the irregularity of much social phenomena, when in lieu of applying it to a great nation altogether, one descends to a province, a town, a village." (Jean-Baptiste Perrin)

"One has, however, no business to feel so much surprise of one's ignorance, when one knows how impossible it is without statistics to conjecture the duration of life and percentage of deaths to births in mankind." (Charles Darwin) 

"Statistics are measurements, enumeration or estimator of natural or social phenomena systematically arranged so as to exhibit their interrelations." (Lewis R Connor)

"Statistics are necessary to appreciate the effects of law." (Florence Nightingale) 

"Statistics are no substitute for common sense." (Richard N Bialac)

"[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man." (Sir Ronald A F Galton)

"Statistics is the science of finding relationships and actionable insights from data." (Nate Silver)

"Statistics is the science, the art, the philosophy, and the technique of making inferences from the particular to the general." (John W Tukey)

"Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive." (William W Irwin)"

"Statistics: The mathematical theory of ignorance." (Morris Kline)

"The application of efficient statistical procedure has power, but the application of common sense has more." (Jasper Wall)

"The central limit theorem in statistics states that, given a sufficiently large sample size, the sampling distribution of the mean for a variable will approximate a normal distribution regardless of that variable’s distribution in the population." (Jim Frost

"The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action." (William E Deming)

"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose." (Florence Nightingale)  [attributed]

"Too little attention is given to the need for statistical control, or to put it more pertinently, since statistical control" (randomness) is so rarely found, too little attention is given to the interpretation of data that arise from conditions not in statistical control." (William E Deming)

"We must be both rational and intellectual, both analytic and imaginative, utilizing both statistics and insight." (Lloyd Reynolds)

"With thermodynamics, one can calculate almost everything crudely; with kinetic theory, one can calculate fewer things, but more accurately; and with statistical mechanics, one can calculate almost nothing exactly." (Eugene P Wigner)