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Your Quotes for 24 April 2006 - Statistics

John Graunt was born at London on this day in 1620, and went on to invent the statistical science of demographics. Statistics have a bad reputation because of the quantity of bad information that is put out, and how infrequently journalists and politicians actually understand them. For good or ill, they do seem to control a good part of modern life.

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination.
     - Andrew Lang

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.
     - Heinz R. Pagels

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.
     - Winston Churchill, 1874 - 1965

What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.
     - Jean Dubuffet, 1901 - 1985

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
     - Rex Todhunter Stout, 1886 - 1975

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