Numerical Data Quotes

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

I bathe in statistics.

The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it.

My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.

I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

The method I take to do this is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature.

In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'

At the end of the day, the numbers that we're hearing are not going to be totally correct or not correct at all.

Numbers are not liberal or conservative. Adjectives are partisan, not numbers.

I never pay any attention to figures.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in business, so is a number.

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

The seventeenth century witnessed the birth of modern science as we know it today. This science was something new, based on a direct confrontation of nature by experiment and observation. But there was another feature of the new science-a dependence on numbers, on real numbers of actual experience.

How can you be on top of the things you do? I think when you are involved in a business, first of all you need to know the business. After that you know the business, you can - the numbers tell you what is happening. You can read with the numbers.

We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics. It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, as long as there is enough of them.

I really love numbers.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another - but which one? Differences are crucial.

The outstanding feature, however, is the possibility that the velocity-distance relation may represent the de Sitter effect, and hence that numerical data may be introduced into discussions of the general curvature of space.

There are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.

People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.