Statistician

🇺🇸Charles Sanders Peirce

Mathematics

pragmatism

1839–1914

"When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness."

🇬🇧Freeman Dyson

Science

1923–2020

"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."

🇺🇸W. Edwards Deming

Mathematics

1900–1993

"I think that people here expect miracles. American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan—but they don't know what to copy!"

William Stanley Jevons

Economics

1835–1882

"Capital simply allows us to expend labour in advance."

🇺🇸Wassily Leontief

Economics

1906–1999

"This work may be best described as an attempt to construct a of the United States."

🇬🇧William Beveridge

Politics

1879–1963

"Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege."

🇺🇸Walter A. Shewhart

Technology

1891–1967

"Broadly speaking, the object of industry is to set up economic ways and means of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort."

🇺🇸Nate Silver

Sports

b. 1978

"GOP are so all-in on an "all base mobilization, all the time" strategy that people just take for granted it must be smart politics when it's far from obvious that's the case."

🇫🇷Siméon Denis Poisson

Mathematics

1781–1840

"That which can affect our senses in any manner whatever, is termed matter."

🇺🇸Benjamin Peirce

Mathematics

1809–1880

"Ideality is preëminently the foundation of Mathematics."

🇺🇸George Gallup

Technology

1901–1984

"I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone — the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity."

"The thing is, that world doesn't exist. All growing up means is that your realize no one will come along to fix things. No one will come along to save you."

🇬🇧Karl Pearson

Mathematics

1857–1936

"Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind."

Thomas Robert Malthus

Politics

1766–1834

"It is also very important to observe, that menial servants are absolutely necessary to make the resources of the higher and middle classes of society efficient in the demand for material products."

🇬🇧E. F. Schumacher

Economics

1911–1977

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

🇮🇹Corrado Gini

Politics

1884–1965

"The most notable difference lies in the psychology of work. In the Orient one works to live; in Europe one works to consume; in America one works to work. These are the three stages of a progressive evolution."

🇺🇸Simon Kuznets

Economics

1901–1985

"The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income."

"He could not live again in Paris. It had seemed better then only because he had been younger, and had not yet known contentment."

🇺🇸Rudolph Rummel

Science

1932–2014

"The social structure of a free, democratic society creates the psychological conditions for its greater internal peace."

🇺🇸Rensis Likert

Psychology

1903–1981

"Research reveal that managers achieving better performance differ in leadership principles and practices from those achieving poorer performance."

🇸🇪Hans Rosling

Education

1948–2017

"“Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles."

"The grand assertion is that you must see the world through probability and that probability is the only guide you need."

🇺🇸John Tukey

Mathematics

1915–2000

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

"Product quality can then be defined as: The composite product characteristics of engineering and manufacturing that determine the degree to which the product, in use, will meet the expectations of the customer."

"Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered."

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Science

1777–1855

"The study of Euler's works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics and nothing else can replace it."

🇺🇸Kenneth Arrow

Mathematics

1921–2017

"Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true."

🇺🇸Robert H. Frank

Economics

b. 1945

"Most students who take introductory economics seem to leave the course without really having learned even the most important basic economic principles."

Florence Nightingale

Medicine

1820–1910

"You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism."

🇺🇸Leonard Jimmie Savage

Mathematics

1917–1971

"For a person who wants to do original, realistic, and critical work in statistics there is no atmosphere anywhere in the world today to compare with this Department."

John Ramsay McCulloch

Literature

1789–1864

"Smuggling is a crime, which occupies so prominent a place in the criminal legislation of all modem states, is wholly the result of vicious commercial and financial legislation"

🇺🇸Elizabeth Loftus

Psychology

b. 1944

"Which would you rather have? A kid with obesity, heart problems, shortened lifespan, diabetes -- or maybe a little bit of false memory?"

Adolphe Quetelet

Science

1796–1874

"It has seemed to me that the theory of probabilities ought to serve as the basis for the study of all the sciences, and particularly of the sciences of observation."

🇺🇸George Dantzig

Science

1914–2005

"George Dantzig, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive"