Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Nate Silver

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.

Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.

Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.

The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.

When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there.

I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.

I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.

If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.

I have to make sure that I make good choices and that if I put my name on it, it's a high-quality endeavor and that I have time to be a human being.

If you're keeping yourself in the bubble and only looking at your own data or only watching the TV that fits your agenda then it gets boring.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

I think punditry serves no purpose.

Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.

Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.

I don't think you should limit what you read.

I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.

To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'

Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.

I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.

I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.

Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

People don't have a good intuitive sense of how to weigh new information in light of what they already know. They tend to overrate it.

In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.

Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.

You don't want to treat any one person as oracular.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

I've just always been a bit of a dork.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.