a visit to the Quote Garden

While looking up the genesis of a quote about statistics this evening (AnneDwyer quoted it: "torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything"; the quote was originally by Gregg Easterbrook), I came across some fun pages: The Quote Garden for statistics and mathematics.

Here are some of the quotes I especially liked. I don't know what this collection says about me, other than that I'm possibly a very silly person.

I notice an interesting thing about the statistics quotes vs. the math quotes: the math quotes tend to be admiring, and the statistics quotes tend to be wry and distrustful. The practice of lying with statistics seems to go back a long way.

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation....
~Paul Auster, The Music of Chance

There was a young man from Trinity,
Who solved the square root of infinity.
While counting the digits,
He was seized by the fidgets,
Dropped science, and took up divinity.
~Author Unknown

How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards? You can subtract it as many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time.
~Author Unknown

The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra.
~Author Unknown

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
~Aaron Levenstein

98% of all statistics are made up.
~Author Unknown

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
~Author Unknown

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