Quotes About Statistics

There are many who measure what they are doing by what they can report. They go out with garrulity in the morning, and come back with statistics at night.

Advertising is only another form of statistics.

You know statistics have proven that listening to prohibition lecturers has driven more people to drink than any other cause.

An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.

If there's a 50/50 chance that a forecast will go wrong, nine times out of ten it will.

Eighty-five percent of all diabetes sufferers are overweight or obese.

I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.

There's little doubt that America is the world's leading producer of serial killers, though any true measurement has to take into account the sheer size of our population. The FBI estimates that there are between thirty and fifty serial killers at large in our country at any given time. That might seem like a shockingly high number, but in a nation of more than 280,000,000 people, it's a minuscule percentage.

The best estimate of experts like James Alan Fox of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University is that, at any given time, there are two to three dozen serial killers at large in the country, responsible for the deaths of between one and two hundred victims.

We are running the risk of becoming a society whittled down to mediocrity, honed to conformity, and valued in statistical averages. We are becoming computerized, monopolized, bureaucratized; we are becoming hero worshipers at the Temple of Sham.

If you ignore the part-time or self-published component of the survey, and look only at full-time, traditionally published authors, incomes look a little better Ã¢â'¬â€œ though at $20,300 annually, you are going to need a trust fund, a rich partner or a sideline in computer fraud to make ends meet. The same basic picture applies in the UK and elsewhere.

Advertising is only another form of statistics.

The British census of Palestine in 1922 recorded 84,000 Jews and 670,000 Arabs, of whom 71,000 were Christian, most of the remainder being Muslim.

In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies.

Between 1801 and 1901, the population of London soared from one million to over six million.

Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog manufacturer.

A Gallup survey in 1962 indicated that only about one-third of American women considered themselves victims of discrimination. Eight years later the proportion had risen to a half, and by 1974 to two-thirds. By any standard these were striking measures of social and cultural change.18

The divorce rate in 1945 shot up to double that of the prewar years, to 31 divorces for every 100 marriages—or 502,000 in all. Although the divorce rate dropped in 1946 and returned to prewar levels by the early 1950s, its jump in 1945 exposed the rise of domestic tensions in the immediate aftermath of war.

He frequently observed, as he walked out, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he stood in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them.

Quicker than the eye can see, however, "people who cannot be housed by private enterprise" have been turned into a statistical group with peculiar shelter requirements, like prisoners, on the basis of one statistic: their income. To carry out the rest of the answer, this statistical group becomes a special collection of guinea pigs for Utopians to mess around with.

If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.

In fact, Social Security is the only source of income nationwide for 29 percent of unmarried elderly women.

Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.