„… a hypothesis test tells us whether the observed data are consistent with the null hypothesis, and a confidence interval tells us which hypotheses are consistent with the data.” William C. Blackwelder

„… the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.” R. A. Fisher

„… the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.” R. A. Fisher

„[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 Francis Galton

„A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.” Thomas Carlyle

„A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.”  ~M.J. Moroney

„Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds-and fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.” Cassius J. Keyser

„After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, „Lies – damned lies – and statistics,” still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.”  ~Leonard Courtney, speech, August 1895, New York, „To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs,” printed in The National Review (London, 1895)  (Thanks, Mark)

„All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

„An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.” John Tukey

„By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece.” Miguel de Cervantes from Don Quixote

„Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.”  ~William W. Watt

„Every third person in Israel saw 1.8 public theater shows last year.” Newspaper headline posted on Maya Bar Hillel’s board.

„Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”  ~Author Unknown

„Facts speak louder than statistics” Mr. Justice Streatfield (1950)

„Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force:  „There are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  ~Mark Twain, autobiography, 1904 (but, as yet no actual record of this under Disraeli’s authorship)

„God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.” Stephen William Hawking

„He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination.”  ~Andrew Lang

„He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts–for support rather than illumination.” Andrew Lang

„I abhor averages.  I like the individual case.  A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live.”  ~Louis D. Brandeis

„I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to digest.  The only one I can ever remember is that if all the people who go to sleep in church were laid end to end they would be a lot more comfortable.”  ~Mrs. Robert A. Taft

„I could prove God statistically.  Take the human body alone – the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.”  ~George Gallup

„If … we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.” R. A. Fisher

„If all the statisticians in the world were laid head to toe, they wouldn’t be able to reach a conclusion” Anon., after comment on economists by G. B. Shaw

„If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself.” Ghandi

„If you need statistics to prove it, it isn’t true.” One of Barbara Doyle’s Professors

„If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” Lord Ernest Rutherford

„It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

„Lottery:  A tax on people who are bad at math.”  ~Author Unknown

„Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.” John Finley

„Models should be as simple as possible, but not more so.” Attributed to Einstein

„Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.” R. A. Fisher

„Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.” R. A. Fisher

„No aphorism is more frequently repeated in connection with field trials, than that we must ask Nature few questions, or, ideally, one question at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logical and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed, if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed.” R. A. Fisher

„Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book.” Isaiah, XXX 8

„Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.” John Tukey

„One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

„Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture….”  ~H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire

„Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket.  According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable.”  ~Bobby Bragan, 1963

„Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.” H.G.Wells

„Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.”  ~Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct

„Statistics are just a way for the mathematician to evangelize his faith.”  ~Hunter Brinkmeier

„Statistics are like bikinis.  What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”  ~Aaron Levenstein

„Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases.”  ~Theodor Billroth

„Statistics are no substitute for judgment.” Henry Clay

„Statistics are the heart of democracy.” Simeon Strunsky

„Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death” Hilaire Belloc

„Statistics can be made to prove anything – even the truth.”  ~Author Unknown

„Statistics may be defined as „a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.”  ~W.A. Wallis

„The aim … is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model . . . . The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the ‘real’ world the model purports to describe.” H. Simon

„The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts… Seek simplicity and distrust it.” A. N. Whitehead

„The average human has one breast and one testicle.”  ~Des McHale

„The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.” Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace

„The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience.” Milton Friedman

„The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.” John Boyle O’Reilly

„The science of statistics is the chief instrumentality through which the progress of civilization is now measured, and by which its development hereafter will be largely controlled.” S. N. D. North

„The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work” John Von Neumann

„The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.”  ~Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1820

„Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.”  ~W.I.E. Gates

„There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”  ~Rex Stout, Death of a Doxy

„Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.” W. H. Auden

„Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.”  ~Gregg Easterbrook 98% of all statistics are made up.  ~Author Unknown

„We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them.” William James

„While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.” Elizur Wright

„While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.  You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.  Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”  ~Arthur Conan Doyle

„You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that your younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.” Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born.

„You can’t fix by analysis what you bungled by design.” Light, Singer and Willett, page v

„You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs while they still have the power to heal.” Armand Trousseau, 19 Century French physician