Quotes About Statistics

In 2014, the worst 2 percent of counties accounted for 52 percent of the murders. Five percent of counties accounted for 68 percent of the murders.

Gun control advocates such as Vox never mention that every single time that guns are banned — either all guns or all handguns — homicide/murder rates rise.

Forty-three percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals prior to their shootings

The claim that guns are rarely used in self-defense comes from only counting defensive actions that result in the death of the attacker. But by any measure, only a fraction of one percent of defensive gun uses result in the criminal attacker being killed or wounded. In 95% of the cases, merely brandishing a firearm is enough to fend off an attacker.

How many gun control laws that a state has potentially explains about 3% of the changes in its total number of firearm deaths.47 The ultimate question is whether total deaths, not just firearm deaths, go up or down as a result of more gun control.

Although data can make a compelling case for something, data rarely create the emotions needed to spur people into action

On average, twelve hundred Congolese had been killed every day since 1998. Five point four million. And it wasn't nearly over yet.

Sugar historian Noel Deerr estimates that per capita sugar consumption was four pounds in 1700, eight pounds by 1729, twelve by 1789, the year of the French Revolution, and eighteen pounds by 1809.

At the same time, African-American males, many of them slaves, had an estimated life expectancy of twenty-three years, 40 percent lower than for whites.)

25 million tourist trips to foreign countries in 1960; 250 million in 1970; 536 million in 1995; 922 million in 2008; 1 billion in 2012.

What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it's that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can't wait too long. It's the single simplest measure to predict divorce.

it's estimated the population has shrunk by sixty percent just in the last two decades.

A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat. He can, and does, devour any set of diamond statistics with insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more.

Total economic production in the United States had doubled;* wages rose by 70 percent.

American workers in war-related industries in 1942–43 died or were injured in numbers twenty times greater than the American servicemen killed or wounded during those same years.

Demographics is destiny

Much of the apparent uniformity of Nature is a uniformity of averages. Our gross senses only take cognizance of the average effect of vast numbers of individual particles and processes; and the regularity of the average might well be compatible with a great degree of lawlessness of the individual. I do not think it is possible to dismiss statistical laws (such as the second law of thermodynamics) as merely mathematical adaptations of the other classes of law to certain practical problems.

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.

I am naturally drawn to numbers but one of the ironies of working with numbers is that the more I work with them, the more skeptical I become about purely number-driven arguments.

But in reality, according to an article in Christianity Today, 80 percent of the churches in America that are growing are experiencing transfer growth, not conversion growth.1 They're merely "reshuffling the Christian deck.

A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody's life.

40 percent of arrests for drug possession in this country are for a drug that 19.8 million of us have used in the past month.

The U.S. routinely ranks lower than other countries in health outcomes such as infant mortality.

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.