Data is messy, and inference is hard.

I was always a data guy, not a theorist. Theorists can maintain total purity. The data are always messy.

— Austan Goolsbee

Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's…

— Tom Stoppard

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking…

— Ronald Fisher

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The inference to which we are brought is that the causes of faction cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought…

— James Madison

When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The modern world needs people with a complex identity who are intellectually autonomous and prepared to cope with uncertainty; who are able to tolerate…

— Robert J. Havighurst

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying,…

— Caitlin Moran

And the user may have a higher comfort level deciding what information to provide rather than worrying about what inferences might be made from…

— Edward Felten

“Holmes laughed. "Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and…

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Man is very much a creature of habit. A thing that rarely strikes his senses will generally have but little influence upon his mind.…

— Alexander Hamilton

...a consistency proof for [any] system ... can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the…

— Kurt Gödel

Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation…

— Bill Nye

The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

If he's - the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a - is a noble institution I would - I would strongly…

— George W. Bush