Any intelligent person will ask themselves a simple question: should I pay up to 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the grower; or should I just buy the regular ones and give the difference to a decent development charity?
Philip Oppenheim, ‘Fairtrade Fat Cats’, The Spectator, November 5, 2005, pp. 17-18.
Social scientists should never predict the future; it’s hard enough to predict the past.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, New York, 2011, p. 278
Among the worst of barbarisms is that of introducing symbols which are quite new in mathematical, but perfectly understood in common, language. Writers have borrowed from the Germans the abbreviation n! to signify 1.2.3…(n-1).n, which gives their pages the appearance of expressing surprise and admiration that 2, 3, 4 &c. should be found in mathematical results.
Augustus De Morgan, The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Difusion of Useful Knowledge, London, 1842, vol. 23, p. 444
It is worth keeping in mind also that the dependability of a sample can be destroyed just as easily by invisible sources of bias as by these visible ones. That is, even if you can’t find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere.
Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics, New York, 1954, p. 19