Themes

"Statistics is the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty."

"There are no routine statistical questions, only questionable statistical routines."

"Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you'd have told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illness you must first study statistics."

"A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspect of reality: statistics."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring."

"Life in financial markets has got no relation to sigmas. I mean, if everybody who had ever operated in financial markets had never had any concept of standard errors, and so on, they would be a lot better off."

"...the statistician knows...that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world."

"Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models."

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

"I wish that people would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved (by large studies); the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion."

"New challenges driven by evolving global technology inspire fresh trends and approaches in teaching statistics in business schools of the 21st century."

"In the 1930s English statistical theory was beginning to travel, with contributions from, amongst others, Hotelling and Snedecor in America and Darmois in France, but its home was still in England where there were four important centres: University College London, Rothamsted Experimental Station, Edinburgh University and Cambridge University with University College and Rothamsted far in the lead. Although Cambridge University was slow to adopt modern statistical theory, Cambridge men–Karl Pearson, Edmund Whittaker and Ronald Fisher–had put the other places on the statistical map. University College was the most established centre and its importance went back to 1893 when Karl Pearson, the professor of applied mathematics, first collaborated with Raphael Weldon, the professor of zoology on a subject they called “biometry.” There was a second surge in the “English statistical school” associated with R. A. Fisher who went to work at Rothamsted in 1919."

"The bulk of statistical criticism is of the hit-and-run variety – the critic points out some real or fancied flaw and supposes that his job is done. Indeed, some critics appear to labor under the misconception that if some flaw can be found in a study, this automatically in validates the author’s conclusions. Since the critic makes no attempt to develop a tenable counterhypothesis, his performance is on a par with that of a proponent who glances at his data and then jumps to his conclusion."

"While nothing is more uncertain than the duration of a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives."

"Statistics is a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty"

"Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write."

"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

"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."

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

"Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth."

"You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?" "The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?"

"This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination."

"A labyrinth is a symbolic journey … but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world."

"The difficulty in dealing with a maze or labyrinth lies not so much in navigating the convolutions to find the exit but in not entering the damn thing in the first place. Or, at least not yet again. As a creature of free will, do not be tempted into futility."

"My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death."

"I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man’s destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth... I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish."

"She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth." "Um, okay. So what is it?" "Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?...Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."

"I thought that I had found my way to the center of the Invisible Labyrinth; and I had — perhaps — discovered no more than the entrance. Watch my dust.... There is no walking backwards, and I am lost in the Labyrinth Invisible. I cannot retrace my steps. I wrote my name on the wall of the Invisible Labyrinth. I was so diligent in my studies; gave my whole time and heart to the pursuit. I wrote my name but I can find it no longer; My ashes blow like dust around the Invisible Labyrinth."

"If he is to choose the path of magic then he must choose responsibly, he must know enough about the labyrinth to walk a true path through it."

"The very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of the labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. … Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

"Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue: Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true."

"I wanted to create a labyrinth which would somehow help to prevent a compositional idea from establishing itself all too quickly. I had the idea of working on all the walls pretty well at the same time,as if they were one large painting completely surrounding me. By constantly wandering in the labyrinth I sought to realise a form of “de-composition”"

"The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth."

"There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one."

"In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend."

"Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing."

"A labyrinth of symbols… An invisible labyrinth of time."

"I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars."

"Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"

"I remember the whirr and whine of her black Singer, the gold traceries on the cast iron rod by the wheel that lifted and lowered the needle. Threading, eyepieces, winding the turquoise string through hooks, around miniscule wheels, up and down, her hands clever in labyrinths,.."

"Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered."

"Stop for a moment and ask yourself what would happen if the merchant fleets of the world were suddenly to vanish. How would raw materials, fuel, food, medicines, publications, and manufactured products move from one continent to another? No nation is completely self-sufficient; all find advantage in foreign trade. For example, 15 of the materials used in making a telephone in the United States must be imported. The industrialization now beginning in developing nations of Africa, Asia, and South America foretells increasing foreign trade, to be carried by the merchant marine."

"Man has profited whenever he found new sources of energy to speed the movement of passengers and goods upon the seas. His efforts reached one culmination in the nineteenth century when swift and wonderfully graceful American clipper ships sailed the long reaches of the oceans. Yet the heyday of these ships lasted less than the lifespan of a man. Long before the superb Flying Cloud made her record 374 miles in 24 hours under sail on her famous passage from New York to San Francisco in 1851, a noisy, dirty, dangerous machine — the steam engine—was taking to the seas and soon was to relieve mariners from their age-old dependence on the favor of the winds. Early in 1819 a small sailing ship, the Savannah, made the first crossing of the Atlantic with the assistance of a steam engine. Hers was a daring pioneering accomplishment sponsored by American merchants. But the shipping industries of the world were not ready for her, and the SS “Savannah” (the letters SS stand for "steamship") was a commercial failure, ending her days as a simple sailing ship. Change came slowly, and not until 20 years later did the first vessel, the British ship “Sirius”, cross the ocean propelled entirely by steam. This venture pointed the way for the development of the great British steam merchant ship fleet."

"From the earliest times man has turned to the waters to carry goods and passengers. Through the centuries he has harnessed many different forms of energy to move his cargoes on rivers, bays, and seas. He has built rafts to move upon the currents, galleys rowed by men, sailing ships of great variety to tap the strength of the winds, and steam and motor ships driven by the energy of coal and oil. Now man is ready to use the primordial source of power, the conversion of matter into energy, to send his merchant vessels on their voyages."

"The idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. . . it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art."

"A quotation from a text or speech."

"Be always employed about some rational thing that the devil find thee not idle."

"Some temptations come to the industrious, but all temptations attack the idle."