Quotes from How to Lie with Statistics

“a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so. —Artemus Ward”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s “big lie” it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“IF YOU can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“Just to clear the air, let's note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“Extrapolations are useful, particularly in that form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or charts made from them, it is necessary to remember one thing constantly: The trend-to-now may be a fact, but the future trend represents no more than an educated guess. Implicit in it is "everything else being equal" and "present trends continuing." And somehow everything else refuses to remain equal, else life would be dull indeed.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“There are at least three levels of sampling involved. Dr. Kinsey’s samples of the population (one level) are far from random ones and may not be particularly representative, but they are enormous samples by comparison with anything done in his field before and his figures must be accepted as revealing and important if not necessarily on the nose. It is possibly more important to remember that any questionnaire is only a sample (another level) of the possible questions and that the answer the lady gives is no more than a sample (third level) of her attitudes and experiences on each question.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word "average" having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is the average you still don't know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is- mean, median, or mode.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“Permitting statistical treatment and the hypnotic presence of numbers and decimal points to befog causal relationships is little better than superstition.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“To be worth much, a report based on sampling must use a representative sample, which is one from which every source of bias has been removed. That is where our Yale figure shows its worthlessness. It is also where a great many of the things you can read in newspapers and magazines reveal their inherent lack of meaning.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“The fault is in the filtering-down process from the researcher through the sensational or ill-informed writer to the reader who fails to miss the figures that have disappeared in the process. A good deal of the misunderstanding can be avoided if to the "norm" or average is added an indication of the range. Parents seeing that their youngsters fall within the normal range will quit worrying about small and meaningless differences. Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word “average” having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is an average you still don’t know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is—mean, median, or mode.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“What comes full of virtue from the statistician’s desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“As Henry G. Felsen, a humorist and no medical authority, pointed out quite a while ago, proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

“graphs are not always what they seem. There may be more in them than meets the eye, and there may be a good deal less.”
― quote from How to Lie with Statistics

Popular quotes

“Reputation is for those who can afford it.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter

“I also teach you to love yourself first. It has nothing to do with ego. In fact, love is such a light that the darkness of the ego cannot exist in it at all. If you love others, if your love is focused on others, you will live in darkness. Turn your light toward yourself first, become a light unto yourself first. Let the light dispel your inner darkness, your inner weakness. Let love make you a tremendous power, a spiritual force.”
― Osho, quote from Love, Freedom, and Aloneness: The Koan of Relationships

“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Life Without Principle

“Derken, müritlerden biri "Yalnızım Üstat," dedi, "saatlerin nalları göğsümü ezip duruyor."

El Mustafa ayağa kalktı ve ortalarında durdu; şiddetli bir rüzgârın sesine benzeyen bir sesle konuştu: "Yalnız! Ne var ki bunda? Yalnız geldin ve yalnız kaybolacaksın sis içinde.

İç öyleyse kadehinden yalnız ve sessizce. Güz günleri başka dudaklara başka kadehler verdi, acı ve tatlı şarap doldurdu kadehlerine, tıpkı senin kadehini doldurduğu gibi.

İç şarabını yalnız, kanının ve gözyaşlarının tadında olsa da; sana susuzluğu bağışladığı için hayata şükret. Çünkü susuzluk olmasa, yüreğin kurumuş bir denizin kıyısı olurdu ancak, şarkıdan ve meddücezirden yoksun.

İç şarabını yalnız, cezbe ve çoşkuyla iç!

Yukarı, başının üstüne kaldır kadehini, sonuna kadar, senin gibi yalnız içenlerin şerefine iç!

Bir gün, insanlarla arkadaşlığı aradım ve onların şölen sofralarına oturdum, yavaş yavaş içtim onlarla; ama şarapları başımı döndürmedi, bağrımı da yakmadı. Sadece ayaklarıma indi. Bilgeliğim susuz, kalbim kilitli ve mühürlü kaldı. Yalnız ayaklarım onların bulanık fikirleriyle arkadaş oldu.

Ve başka insanların arkadaşlığını aradım bir daha, ne de sofralarında onlarla şarap içtim.

Bunun için sana diyorum, saatlerin nalları göğsünü ezip dursa da, ne önemi var! Hüznünün kadehinden yalnız içmen iyidir, neşenin kadehinden de yalnız içeceksin.”
― Kahlil Gibran, quote from The Garden of The Prophet

“Thinking about moats can protect your investment capital in a number of ways. For one thing, it enforces investment discipline, making it less likely that you will overpay for a hot company with a shaky competitive advantage. High returns on capital will always be competed away eventually, and for most companies—and their investors—the regression is fast and painful.”
― quote from The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.