Quotes from Nate Silver

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

I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.

I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.

If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

You don't want to treat any one person as oracular.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.

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

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.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

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

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.

We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.

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

If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.

I've just always been a bit of a dork.

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

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.