STATISTICS--the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science and of every art: the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organization based on experience, for it only gives results of our experience-- Florence Nightingale, Statistician

WE encounter here, of course, the usual dilemma confronting the individual who would like to be both statistical purist and practical researcher. Few, if any, users of chi-square tests or standard error estimates with maximum likelihood estimation are in a position to fully justify the probability values they report. Nearly always, the strongest appropriate claim would be something like: "To the extent that the underlying assumptions hold, we conclude that..." Or, perhaps more frankly: "The statistical tests and probability values in this paper are reported in a mainly descriptive spirit, to help orient the reader among the various models we present."--John C. Loehlin, from Latent Variable Models: An introduction to factor, path, and structural analysis, 3rd ed., 1998.

ONCE upon a time, statisticians only explored. Then they learned to confirm exactly--to confirm a few things exactly, each under very specific circumstances. As they emphasized exact confirmation, their techniques inevitably became less flexible. The connection of the most used techniques with past insights was weakened. Anything to which a confirmatory procedure was not explicitly attached was decried as "mere descriptive statistics", no matter how much they had learned from it. Today, exploratory and confirmatory can--and should--proceed side by side--John W. Tukey, from Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977.

STATISTICIANS, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models--George Box

TO cast lots puts an end to disputes, and decides between powerful contenders--Proverbs

IT is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should become the most important object of human knowledge...The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability--Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace

STATISTICAL thinking will one day be as necessary for effective citizenship as the ability to read and write--H. G. Wells

WHEN you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind--Lord Kelvin

"DATA! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay!"--Sherlock Holmes

I KNOW of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error" [the normal curve]. The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason--Sir Francis Galton

IT is unworthy of excellent men, to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation--Gottfried Leibniz

STATISTICAL significance testing can involve a tautological logic in which tired researchers, having collected data on hundreds of subjects, then conduct a statistical test to evaluate whether there were a lot of subjects, which the researchers already know, because they collected the data and know they are tired. This tautology has created considerable damage as regards the cumulation of knowledge--Bruce Thompson 

REGARDING model selection procedures in multiple regression: "IF you torture the data long enough, it will confess. But there is no guarantee that it will tell you the truth."--from Berk, Regression Analysis: A Constructive Critique, 2004.