Quotes About Statistics

Farmers have good years and bad years—like every other business—but the median income of farm households is consistently higher than the median income of nonfarm households. The average American household has a net worth of $82,600, versus $827,000 for farm households.19 About half of the billions in farm subsidies go to farmers with household income over $150,000.

We used to be the drunkest nation in the world; now we are the fattest nation in the world.

In 1820, the average amount an individual drank in one day was more than three times the average today.119

I estimate the number [of incest victims] to be somewhere between ten and twenty million Americans...

The experts agree with them about the importance of the quality of the debulking: "there is absolutely nothing the doctor can influence, including choosing the type of chemotherapy, that affects a woman's chance of surviving her ovarian cancer as much as the quality of her initial surgery . . . Sadly, however, only between 30 and 50 percent of the women with ovarian cancer in any given geographic region will have optimal surgery." I

American flag appeared on the screen. "Between 2001 and 2012, nearly sixty-five hundred American soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. During that same period of time—" the screen shifted to the face of a battered woman clutching two small children "—almost twelve thousand women were murdered by their husbands, boyfriends or a former partner. Even now, three women are murdered every single day by the man who claims to love them.

Less than four percent of foster kids graduate with a college degree, compared to 46 percent in the general population. And don't get me started on the number of young women who end up pregnant by age twenty-one.

During the twentieth century, America recorded its highest percentage of foreign-born residents in 1910: 14.7 percent of the population. A century later, about 40 million people or nearly 13 percent of Americans today are foreign-born citizens.

One death is a tragedy one million is a statistic.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. Quoted by someone with a very sick imagination but misattributed to Stalin

Mike Cabral's task force came to believe that John Orr was responsible for the vast majority of all the arsons they were studying, and by way of unverifiable proof, they pointed to the astounding statistic that showed a 90 percent drop in brush-fire activity since his arrest. In the county foothill area, brush fires had averaged sixty-seven a year clear back to 1981. After his arrest the average had dropped to one per year.

In 1940 the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 19 percent. Today it is close to 70 percent.

Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can't tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it.

Fighting for the acceptance of Bayesian networks in AI was a picnic compared with the fight I had to wage for causal diagrams [in the stormy waters of statistics].

overrate it in the sense that they often control for many more variables than they need to and even for variables that they should not

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become since he was last there. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934

Health-care costs when I got into the industry in '88 were 16 percent a year inflation. When I got out in 1997, they were less than 1 percent.

After adjusting for inflation, the average income of the top 5% of households grew by 38% from 1989 to 2013. By comparison, the average real income of the other 95% of households grew less than 10%.

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the first use of alcohol typically begins at age 12.

The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you.