Themes

"The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium."

"In Deutsch's view, to say that a social system is in equilibrium implies that: 1) it will return to a particular state when disturbed; 2) the disturbance is coming from outside the system; 3) the greater the disturbance the greater the force with which the system will return to its original state; 4) the speed of the system's reaction to disturbance is somehow less relevant — a sort of friction, or blemish having no place in the "ideal" equilibrium; 5) no catastrophe can happen within the system."

"The equilibrium model describes systems which, in moving to an equilibrium point, typically lose organization, and then tend to hold that minimum level within relatively narrow conditions of disturbance."

"[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems."

"In regard to this principle, that all men are born free and equal, if there is an animal on earth to which it does not apply—that is not born free, it is man—he is born in a state of the most abject want, and in a state of perfect helplessness and ignorance, which is the foundation of the connubial tie…. Who should say that all the soil in the world is equally rich, the first rate land in Kentucky and the Highlands of Scotland because the superficial content of the acre is the same, would be just as right as he who should maintain the absolute equality of man in virtue of his birth. The ricketty and scrofulous little wretch who first sees the light in a work-house, or in a brothel, and who feels the effects of alcohol before the effects of vital air, is not equal in any respect to the ruddy offspring of the honest yeoman; nay, I will go further, and say that a prince, provided he is no better born than royal blood will make him, is not equal to the healthy son of a peasant."

"In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel."

"So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility."

"No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel."

"If they don't like the brothels, they needn't go to them."

"This is virgin territory out here for whorehouses."

"Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of religion."

"Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit. Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit. Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit. L'ung vault l'autre; c'est a mau rat mau chat. Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit; Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit, En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat."

"The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard"

"The main problem with statistics is statisticians."

"There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up."

"Thomasina: If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers? Septimus: We do. Thomasina: Then why do your shapes describe only the shapes of manufacture? Septimus: I do not know. Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet."

"The individual source of the statistics may easily be the weakest link. Harold Cox tells a story of his life as a young man in India. He quoted some statistics to a Judge, an Englishman, and a very good fellow. His friend said, Cox, when you are a bit older, you will not quote Indian statistics with that assurance. 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 chowty dar [chowkidar] (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases."

"Numbers and stats bob in a sentimental slop, a swampy slurry of bits of hard data and buckets of mushy manipulation."

"Although its evolution in the United States differed markedly from that of applied mathematics, statistics, too, benefited from the presence of the emigres and from the overall war effort. After a protracted period of professional differentiation from the social scientists and from the social sciences, mathematical statisticians had formed their own society, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), in 1935. By 1938, the IMS had also taken over responsibility for the Annals of Mathematical Statistics, a journal that had been founded in 1929 to serve the needs of the more mathematically and theoretically inclined statistical practitioners. Thus, when refugees like Neyman, William Feller, Mark Kac, and Abraham Wald took up positions in the United States at Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, and Columbia, respectively, they were able to participate in a young, but viable, community of mathematical statisticians."

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

"Average a left-hander with a right-hander and what do you get?"

"The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the art of statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service."

"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose."

"In God we trust. All others must bring data."

"91.7 percent of all statistics are made-up on the spot."

"A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions."

"While it is easy to lie with statistics, it is even easier to lie without them."

"A statistical procedure is not an automatic, mechanical truth-generating machine."

"According to a University College London study (2014), 40% of women surveyed with severe mental illness had suffered rape or attempted rape in adulthood, and 53% of those had attempted suicide as a result. In the general population, 7% of women had been victims of rape or attempted rape, of whom 3% had attempted suicide. If these statistics don't sound accurate to you, your hesitation or disbelief supports another reality about rape research: Because so many individuals who survive a rape may not report a rape (for a multitude of reasons), statistics have limited meaning."

"Without the aid of statistics nothing like real medicine is possible."

"Uncertainty is a personal matter; it is not the uncertainty but your uncertainty."

"Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lampposts — for support rather than illumination."

"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."

"Each of us has been doing statistics all his life, in the sense that each of us has been busily reaching conclusions based on empirical observations."

"Statistics is the study and informed application of methods for reaching conclusions about the world from fallible observations."

"Statistics is the art of stating in precise terms that which one does not know."

"Most people don’t have a good understanding of just how variable statistics are, even when you are dealing with robots."

"I think the essential thing if you want to be a good statistician, as opposed to being a mathematician, is to talk to people and find out what they're doing and why they're doing it."

"Statistics are often the last refuge of the antihumanist."

"Statistics is both the science of uncertainty and the technology of extracting information from data."

"A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's "big lie"; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you."

"“Without Statistics and numbers, it's a mere thought of unconvincing opinions.”"

"It is a statistical commonplace that the interpretation of a body of data requires a knowledge of how it was obtained."

"briefly, and in its most concrete form, the object of statistical methods is the reduction of data. A quantity of data, which usually by its mere bulk is incapable of entering the mind, is to be replaced by relatively few quantities which shall adequately represent the whole, or which, in other words, shall contain as much as possible, ideally the whole, of the relevant information contained in the original data."

"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."

"The rise of biometry in this 20th century, like that of geometry in the 3rd century before Christ, seems to mark out one of the great ages or critical periods in the advance of the human understanding."

"Statistics has been the most successful information science. Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it."

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

"In our private life as in our collective life there is no other truth than a statistical one."

"I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can't collect three grains of rice from everybody."