A Quote by Alan Greenspan

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

Alan Greenspan

Quote Topics

Cannot History Reduced Set Statistics

Quote Author

Alan Greenspan
American - Economist
Born: March 6, 1926

Genius simply cannot be reduced to a set of rules for anyone to follow.

Albert Einstein

One influential philosophical position about the use of probability in science holds that probabilities are objective only if they are based on micro-physics; all other probabilities should be interpreted subjectively, as merely revealing our ignorance about physical details. I have argued against this position, contending that the objectivity of micro-physical probabilities entails the objectivity of macro-probabilities.

Elliott Sober

As soon as the circumstances of an experiment are well known, we stop gathering statistics. ... The effect will occur always without exception, because the cause of the phenomena is accurately defined. Only when a phenomenon includes conditions as yet undefined,Only when a phenomenon includes conditions as yet undefined, can we compile statistics. ... we must learn therefore that we compile statistics only when we cannot possibly help it; for in my opinion, statistics can never yield scientific truth.

Claude Bernard

The first requirement in using statistics is that the facts treated shall be reduced to comparable units.

Claude Bernard

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

Albert Camus

The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.

Stephen Jay Gould

We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power.

E. Haldeman-Julius

The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

Isaac Asimov

There is a reductive nature to the Internet, and it's not limited to comic book news sites and stuff: it's everybody. There is a reductive nature of it, by which anything that's said very quickly gets reduced down to the next. Reduced, reduced, reduced to the point where rumors with some sense of nuance to them just become fact.

Mark Waid

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

David Brooks

Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

I do not have a history in set design. I have a history in art. I draw. But I learned set design when I couldn't afford to have a team and I didn't want to look like I was indie. I wanted to give fans the visual.