Quotes About Accuracy

You should see that a bigger sample makes for a shrinking standard error, which is how large national polls can end up with shockingly accurate results.

At first glance, the most suspicious thing about polling is that the opinions of so few can tell us about the opinions of so many.

The overall lesson of this chapter is that statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math.

Not that he'd have doubted Helen's word in any case; she was a librarian, and librarians were never wrong.

There was an eccentric editor of the Hansard , the official record of parliamentary debates in Britain. One day, goes the story, an angry member of Parliament stormed into the office of this editor, threw an open copy of the paper on the table, and said to him: "I never said that!" To which the editor replied quite calmly: "I know you didn't, but you should have.

Things are always like that. Our eye sees something; we take a stone and aim at it. But the stone rarely succeeds like the eye in hitting the mark.

Only the hand fails to throw as straight as the eye sees.

I will not be misquoted!

The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.

If you misquote me, I'll come out and be like, they misquoted me. This is what I said. This is exactly how I meant it. Whether you believe me or not, don't really care.

Journalists have misquoted people for so long - and quoted them out of context that for many people like to have their words on record.

I hate seeing myself misquoted.

I'm very used to being misquoted.

This golf course, you miss a shot a little bit off-line, it's going to bite you.

I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.

I need to get better with my 3-wood and hybrid. Those are the clubs I missed the majority of my fairways with.

I've got a wife who never misses me. Her aim is perfect!

A great performance never misses its mark.

With bombs and fires, you get only one mistake.

We made only one real mistake. And even then we were right.

I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

At times Thucydides may be clearly mistaken in both detail and interpretation, but the extent of his accuracy and analysis astounds in a world where travel was difficult, written sources rarely available, and the physical obstacles to the writing of history substantial.

Yes, it's easy to lie with statistics—but it's even easier to lie without them.*

Unfortunately, the selection mechanism is often some combination of beauty and shock value, rather than pertinence and accuracy.