NATE SILVER

People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.

Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.

The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.

I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

Voters memories will fade some.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.

I'm a pro-horserace guy.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

You get steely nerves playing poker.

It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.

Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.