Data Quotes

Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Know your numbers' is a fundamental precept of business.

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.

It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. But I am sure that figures show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.

Consider data without prejudice.

The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.

The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.

Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.

I need to know how many records I've sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we're gonna be playing shows or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.

I definitely think there's some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don't think data collects it. They're not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.

Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses

Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data

Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.

The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril...It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.

Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.

Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.

Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.

The days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered.