Darrell Huff Quotes

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's 'big lie'; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

A difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.

It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it.

Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.